So I've had two really good ideas lately that I found already had plenty of other people already doing them in practice. First one was a question/answer-based social networking site. Three sites found:
airow was closest to my idea... actually almost exactly. Too bad they beat me to the punch three years ago. It's interesting that wis.dm got so much venture money. I think they're going about their site the entirely wrong way trying to section out their users and questions into different segments. Their terminology and other things are their site are huge usability breaks too.
Also recently had ideas about reputation-management. Found three sites which all basically do what I wanted to do (I think):
Trustplus looks the coolest and most promising of the three. Claimid is cool, but I don't think it'll go anywhere unless some more automation is added to it. It's cool to have something based around openid, but it shouldn't require you to do everything. Rapleaf is neat, but it's been hard to find information about their roadmap. It looks like they're mainly looking into social networks and e-commerce for users. Good place to start and I think Trustplus is starting there too, but Trustplus already has stuff built that you can use as a broswer addon; really good way to get it off the ground and working no matter how small your community is.
So these pretty much blew me out of the water. It's likely you'll see at least one of these rep-management companies get huge in the next few years here.
My goal now is to look years more into the future and come up with the next big thing THEN instead of the next big thing from last year that five people have already started on.
