Competitive website appeared today

[HWT]

For some time I have had an idea for something (lets not go into details). I bought a beautiful domain for it some months ago, and a few days ago the lack of this idea on the internet just irritated me so much I actually started work on the idea.

For as long as I have been running my own website there were no competing businesses, no other websites, noone even came close to this business idea.

On May 4th 2010 (note today's date) a press release popped up that the first and only X is up in beta mode. They are doing something virtually identical to what I was going to do (except I was going to do it in html and they are using flash). The company doing it has a main website that is almost identical to my main website in content (except mine isn't flash), demographics, traffic, ranking etc etc. Ok, there's some differences but they certainly aren't dramatic. You could easily lump our two sites together.

Is this a sign to drop it, or push on and produce a superior product? I am a programmer/web designer by trade, its very hard to tell if they are or not - judging by the 100% flash site and "copyright 2007" they aren't, because I estimate this project is about a 3-6 month one not a 3 year one. Most of the early expense will be in webhosting costs, and the back end coding isn't exactly difficult stuff.

And yes, I do tend to have lots of ideas ... my other websites are happily ticking away making modest amounts of money, our physical business is doing the same since we changed advertising tactics, and we simply don't have the cash to complete our main project, which is why I keep getting sidetracked by other ideas in an attempt to make money for the main one. So far no one single project has made enough money to live off.

Oh and my domain name is WAY better than their domain name

[HWT]

Hrm, some poking around with domaintools.com and the same people have about 39 websites (the new idea site of theirs shares hosting with those 39), the ones I can access with a free account there are ... really old, really low traffic and really bad. Even their highest traffic site is not exactly high (quite similar stats to my site that is the same genre as theirs).

I can see why they didn't nab the great domain name I got - they registered theirs in 2006 and I got mine last year but it was previously registered for many years. Apparently I just got lucky.

I wonder if these people actually realise that this idea is actually a reasonably simple exercise in a HIGH TRAFFIC website and having a flash site on a shared host is probably not a good idea ...