>As a general rule, one should expect no-one to care about anything new you happen to be working on. Consider: if people cared, it would be done already

I think that's a bit of a jump! There's plenty of things that people care about but don't personally think they could achieve. If you do a startup to end world hunger, people would be interested as soon as you proved your credibility in actually achieving it.

Also - Interesting side-project! What's your background (are you a software dev? biotech scientist?)