photo by dailyinvention

A few people have noticed that Web 2.0 is getting boring. There are too many applications vying in the same areas, which means most of their features overlap, and only a few have anything original going on. Competition is good, but when the competition varies so little, it makes sense to simply stick with what works for you already. For example, for bookmarks I continue to use del.icio.us (although I have a ma.gnolia account, I couldn't see the point or benefit), for photos I use Flickr, and for videos I use YouTube. There are many worthy competitors in social bookmarking, photo sharing, and video sharing, but none of them are sufficiently impressive enough to sway me.

Consider Riya, a well funded photo search startup. Their unique feature is face recognition technology. It works well, but.. why the heck would a majority of the market need that feature? If the person in a photo is of any importance, their name would probably be in the title or description already. It's a really clever feature that seems exciting to start with, but is really quite pointless for the majority of users.

Don't launch a new service unless you have an edge that will have a significant effect on users already in that sphere, as they'll be your biggest market. FeedDigest, for example, has definitely won a lot of custom over from FeedRoll in the last year. But are any of twenty different photo sharing services going to win me over from Flickr? It's not likely since all my photos are in Flickr, people know what Flickr is, and Flickr is still fresh enough and has enough features for it to remain very usable. Why should a Flickr user jump ship? If Flickr suddenly became unreliable or began to drop photos, then that'd be a different issue, and its competitors would probably have an edge on reliability. But as of early 2006, that's just not so.

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