[jmonegro]

You can't. You just have to make sure you're the best. Nothing has stopped people from trying to knock off Google, but because they're the best, they thrive. Same with Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, and all the other pop startups.

[abl]

Of course there is no single magic pill, but I'll try anyway. :)

Google - PageRank. Google was not the first with the product anyway, there were many other search engines in play already at the time - AltaVista, Excite, AskJeeves... Google's infrastructure is not easy to replicate, by the time others caught on to PageRank, Google was already growing exponentially, past the "start-up" phase. By the time others replicated the functionality, Google was a house-hold name.

Twitter - SMS, simple interface, API, brand. Would you rather tweet, or send jaiku's?

YouTube - progressive Flash download, reply features, similar videos actually worked compared to other sites.

Facebook - clean, organized interface, college accounts validation.

One point to mention though, none of these sites had direct knock-offs, icon for icon, like the twitvids. Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc.. had all grown in popularity before they were knocked off. Or at least that seems to be the case, unless there were knock-offs that simply were not nearly the same caliber and just never made it past grandpa's blog as far as spreading use. What I am talking about are early-early stages of a start-up, like the twitvids. And looks like they have similar caliber potential judging by their features currently offered.

P.S. If you want to see a nice Facebook knock-off, take a look at vkontakte.ru. THE most popular site among the Russian internet users. Probably the only thing it's missing is the API, and the fact that it found it's niche with the Russian language.

There is something to be said about knock-offs, and that is why there is reason to be concerned about it. When listening to presentations of enterpreneurs from successful start-ups like Facebook and LinkedIn, they will often talk about "what keeps them up at night."

[pj]

abl, you are missing the point.

None of the features of the services you mention are "difficult" to do. PageRank is very easy. The scale is difficult, but lots of companies can scale too. How many YouTubes are there? How many social networks are there?

The issue here is that YouTube continues to improve. They never stop. They just recently "knocked off" the "turn down the lights" feature at Hulu. They could have said, "aw forget it, no one likes turn down the lights" and refused to implement it.

YouTube continues to run hard and fast. That's why they continue to be the winner. If they stop and they don't give their users a constantly improving product that matches the rest and betters the rest, then youtube will cease to be the leader.