If you’ve got an idea for a web service or a product, the first question you should ask yourself is: who am I going to compete against? Strangely enough, it seems that not many people do this. That’s why some corners of the web are overcrowded with hundreds of similar services, usually proportional to the success of the few that stand at the top.

Now, I’m all for innovation and going against all odds - if everyone would just play safe, the world (and the web) would be a boring place. But, if you choose an unpopulated space, even a mediocre idea can yield good results, while to succeed in some areas you need a killer idea, solid funding, a great team of developers and a lot of luck on top of that. Let’s look at some areas of the web where the competition is really, really hard.

1. Search. Everyone big enough to buy it or develop it has already got some sort of search technology in their arsenal. But even if giants like Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft and the millions they invested in their search technologies aren’t competition enough for you, check out the other hundreds of search engines, including meta-search engines, vertical search, semantic search, visual search and just plain old weird search. If you’re still bent on developing your search engine, there are a couple of things going for you. Although Google is already delivering better search results than anyone though possible 10 years ago, everyone still seems to be bent on the idea that there’s much to improve here. So, if your search even hints at being “smart” or “semantic”, you might get bought out by a giant. And that’s quite a good deal.

2. Communities - MySpace is already running out of people to recruit. At their current growth pace, soon there won’t be any users left that are not on MySpace, so if you’re planning on launching a community, you can’t really count on people being unfamiliar with the concept. Of course, MySpace is not your only competitor; there’s also Facebook, which waits for more money to be printed so that there would be enough to buy them out, as well as Bebo, Orkut, and dozens of others. In fact, online communities are so “in” right now that even if you launch a non-English, music-based community aimed only at middle-aged college-dropouts from a certain county of a certain state in a certain country, you still might not be focused enough. Another problem here is that the great features and shiny technologies rarely work: the biggest online communities are also the ugliest and not really technologically advanced. The upside of all this is that you can always go over to Ning and create your own social network within 5 minutes absolutely free.

3. Social bookmarking - first of all, the .us domains are all taken, so don’t even think about that. There are people out there right this very minute developing algorithms which check which exotic countries’ top level domains can be used to end English words. And if you want it to be a derivative of the word “delicious”, forget about it. I’m not kidding, check this out: del.icio.us, digglicious.com, mobilicio.us, thumblicio.us, staralicious.com, populicio.us, similicio.us.

Some of these aren’t social bookmarking services; but del.icio.us faces more competition from the likes of magnolia, and, to some extent, StumbleUpon, Digg, Reddit and Netscape. But the point is clear: when the competition is so fierce that you can’t even name your damn service, I think it’s time to move on to something else.

4. Web Office tools & suites. Zimbra, Zoho, DimDim, Sundera, Plaxo, Preezo. I swear, some of these have to be swear words in exotic languages. Hell, for all I know, they might all be swear words in exotic languages. Still, it’s just a small sample of Office-related apps out there, and the crowd is lead by none other than Google itself with its Google Docs and Spreadsheets, which is - unfortunately for you, young developer - already pretty damn good. And, yes, this also goes for calendars: there’s a lot of them, and many are great, like Google Calendar, Remember the Milk, and 30 Boxes, to name a few. So, if you’re going to launch an online office suite, it better be leaving Microsoft Office in the dust, or else it’s toast.

5. Photo sharing The first rule of photo sharing is: you should never name your product in a grammatically correct way. This makes for a myriad of interesting possibilities which will never be fully exploited, so if you’re starting a photo sharing service you’re in the clear here. If in doubt, just take a word and drop a vowel or two, and you’re all set.

However, this won’t help you when you actually try to develop such a service, as it’s pretty much all been done by Flickr and its many followers, most notably Google’s Picasa Web Albums. Even if you try developing a more specific service, like online photo editing, you will still get greeted by several solid products that are already doing it.

6. Video sharing. The problem with video sharing is in content. Sure, you can create a killer service, but how are you going to get people to fill it with content? If you had a million people uploading videos daily, you’d still need a couple of years to catch up with YouTube. And the competition is fierce here, too. Besides heavyweights like Metacafe, Dailymotion, Google Video, there are dozens of smaller sites out there trying to create a userbase. On top of all that, if you do manage to draw attention to your service, expect to be sued. A lot. By companies with lots of money.

7. Personalized portal. Here, it isn’t so much about there being a lot of competition out there. The problem is that the competition is damn good, and the fact that it’s hard for any of them to introduce a killer feature that would separate it from the rest proves that it’s hard to innovate in this space. Sure, you can try your luck, but you need to be better than Google Homepage, Netvibes, Pageflakes, Yourminis, Yahoo!, My.Netscape, Goowy, and several others. And they’re all very, very good.

Well, that’s it. I hope that this list will discourage many a young and aspiring developer from ever developing anything, and save me from reviewing hundreds upon hundreds of similar services! *just kidding, kids. Keep ‘em coming, I love it.

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