Competitio.us is a very useful looking competitive intelligence service built in Ruby on Rails that launched today. It’s a simple but powerful way to keep track of competing companies online. This is something that I think many of our readers, at least the ones working on startups, could find very helpful. The service is currently free but there are obviously any number of ways it could be monetized. I would gladly pay a subscription fee for it. Most of the functions here can be performed by various free or low cost services, but this one brings many of them into one place.
The creators of Competitio.us, Dream This, LLC, have been working on similar services for different markets for some time. See for example their site Personal Trainer Pages. I think this newest service is right on target.
The basic idea is that it’s a tool for web startup teams to keep track of their competitors. You start by creating a project like “Ajax startpages” or whatever field you are interested in. You then add competitors by home page URL. Competitio.us hits the web and brings back each company’s blog, recent blog posts, related blog posts from off site and detailed traffic data from Alexa.
Each competitor page has an Ajax drop down to build a feature list. When one competitor on a project has a feature added, a check box for that feature is added to all the other competitors’ pages. You can then view all of the competitors and features in a full page matrix.
Blog posts are displayed (via the Google Ajax Search API) on the same page as each company’s information and can be sent to the clippings section with one click. When you add something to clippings you’re asked for comments and whether you want to email the clipping to the rest of your team.
There’s also a browser bookmarklet for adding news to clippings from off site. That bookmarklet brings up fields for related project, competitors and comments.
All of these clippings from a team of users can be subscribed to through a secure RSS feed. Any number of enterprise social bookmarking services are slowly emerging but this single feature in a relatively lightweight service makes it really valuable.
A team can work on any number of projects, each with different permission levels for individual users. Recent activity is listed on the sidebar so you can quickly check in on the newest discussion about your competitors in one place.
The only things I can think of that would be nice to have included here that are not might be an alert system leveraging filtered RSS feeds and maybe an automatic logo or favicon capture so you can keep the competitor’s look and feel in your minds’ eye. Audio search to know when competitors are mentioned in podcasts could be good. Some different functionality to compare your competitors to your own product could be helpful as well.
I think Competitio.us is a nice clean product that the team should be proud of. Web 2.0 sees a lot of very far out products getting developed but this one makes perfect sense. Whether you’re working on something else that makes sense or you’re on one of the many teams building things that are hard to even imagine - Competitio.us may be just the 2.0 tool you’re looking for to stay on top of the news in your market niche.
great idea, horrible name
This is a great idea. Thanks for the link!
just registered, I like that they don’t ask me for much info (like even what my own domain is). I can see myself using this instead of the random notepad files I usually have everywhere keeping track of companies in my space and the emails i shoot off to my partners non stop
looks like they also have competitious.com - wonder if its a bit tongue in cheek?
Does that mean I have to use the tool I built for this to track competito.us too?
That only makes sense, Fred. Given that this is your field you should probably track yourself with competito.us too. Good luck not getting the wires crossed.
It’s a nice web app but i don’t see it being too useful. The only feature i find useful is the traffic tool which can easily be access from alexa.
What i want is a system that shows me what my competitors keywords are, how they are ranking, what adwords they are targetting etc.
okay, so i’m actually a real long time member of the society of competitive intelligence professionals (scip.org) and a very active member of the ‘CI’ community….all that i can tell you is that after looking this over, it is not what i would call a real tool for CI, just another type of clipping service, not actually as useful as the free page change detectors or other specific tools, and all part of the world of ’secondary research’…that said, as a freebie it’s neat looking and easy to use and could be a great way to introduce to the basic idea that competitors should be tracked…however, the product feature matrices are too simple and the analysis and reporting output is crapola….gonna take a much harder look at this…to be honest, i would strongly advise anybody considering this to just take a long look at something like a group wiki - much easier to manage and search and pull out information, more simple and intuitive collaboration for secondary collection etc…just my opinion of course, but the software that i’ve used and reviewed for myself and scip just makes this site look like child’s play for real market insight…
Dave,
I appreciate your opinion and would love to talk with you more about what type of features you would like to see. We built Competitio.us to manage our own competitive research and have found it to be a valuable tool for keeping each other up to date on our own respective space. Depending on your industry, the Google blog search results can actually be very relevant. We don’t claim to do anything along the lines of what you probably do as a CI Professional(yet), instead we focus on making it easier to access and record information that is already available elsewhere. Our initial release focuses on collecting information, however we plan to also begin helping you analyze and discover information in the near future.
Thanks,
Kris
looks interesting - hoping to make announcements in this space soon ourselves. good luck!
rgds
carl
Very nice. Simple sign up, simple interface. My feed isnt working yet, but I hope it does soon (Giving me a Rails application error).
I think this will be useful for my own site, and I am sure that it will be of use to many others trying to start a new site.
looks interesting - hoping to make announcements in this space soon ourselves. good luck!
Bryan,
We found the error in the logs, we will have it fixed by this evening. It would help us if you could shoot us an email to let us know if you had any clippings when you subscribed to the feed.
shoot us an email if you get a chance: info at competitio.us.
Thanks - Kris
Hey Fred, do you have a link to your tool? I can’t find it on your web site.
“That only makes sense, Fred. Given that this is your field you should probably track yourself with competito.us too. Good luck not getting the wires crossed.”
If thats not the sign of a bubble, I don’t know what is.
jk..
I agree with Dave. Decent first try. Using a baseball analogy, they didn’t exaclty wiff, but simply fouled it off. Still in the batters box. This really doesn’t go enough in depth with the search results to provide all that much useful information that anyone responsible for CI for their company probably is not already getting using existing search tools. It’s an interesting idea to aggregate it in one interface. This also might be useful as an initial start for a web compaly that was just figured out they should do some compete research. (But if that’s the case ,they are already in trouble)
I don’t think basing data collecting solely on the URL of your competitor returns deep enough content. And some competitors have a pletora of products, some of which aren’t in a company’s particular space. (For example if I’m in the web conf business how to I ensure I find information on LCS, Sametime, and say ,Breeze from Adobe simply relying on the company’s URL?) I use search but there more valuable things to look for in a search result than url results that point me to blogs and other urls. Happy to discuss, Kris as I think there is a lot of need for a great tool in this space.
Also, why do I care it was built using Ruby on Rails and has some Ajax bits? Doesn’t seem to make the search results any better
very well designed. + django rocks, nice job.
Interesting concept, and I like how simple it is. It doesn’t propose to be anything more complicated than it offers, which is nice. You can certainly see, however, where they would or could go if they choose to expand on the services and potentially monetize it.
It is nice to be able to collaboratively share some of the data there, however, and the google-grabbing / aggregation is a good start. I wouldn’t say I’d use it for in-depth super-detailed product comparisons or evaluations, but they don’t seem to be saying that it’s for that purpose in the first place. As a simple product comparison matrix and data aggregation tool it’s definitely functional.
It’ll be interesting to see if they develop it further and where the concept goes. Kudos for working on a useful service (as opposed to a lot of the nutty stuff out there).
–Dan
im finding it fairly useful. they seem pretty open to feedback, which is good, so I can see this growing into a lot more than it is now. in all the stuff i’ve done i always start small, launch, and grow, so i imagine that is their strategy as well. the fact that its free can tell you their initial target audience wasn’t companies who would otherwise hire intelligence pros, i gather
Finally a good idea. I was getting tired of seeing all these RSS feed readers and social networking/bookmarking sites pop all over the place.
Best of luck. And features such as keywords the competitors rank high for and the google adwords stats, etc, would make this really useful.
Sigh, the old ideas are always the best
We developed something very similar using search agents 9 years ago. This is very cool though, and can be used for much more than tracking competitors.
nice too. too bad the project detail page doesnt work for Safari, like the blog and features sections.
and James, it’s made with Ruby on Rails…not django.
I’m critical about the products posted here, but I like this.
I have a few projects I’m developing and already I found interesting post via competitious (btw terrible name).
Also, for the most part I’m not using all the other stuff posted on TC. I just don’t have the time for Beebo, MySpace, etc. But this actually saves me time by helping manage the web surfing I would normally do on my competitors.
Not sure of their business plan though - I guess eventually it will cost $ for premium services where you can track like 3 or more “projects”, etc.
But it’s simple, clean and easy to use and actually practical for someone who builds web apps that focuses on taking a competitors idea and making it better.
nice.
Definitely looks lightweight but it is a first try and they will be implementing all of our suggestions
I did an hour demo with Buzzlogic yesterday, which could be part of my CI toolbox along with Competitious. Mashing up both, with a few more advanced CI tools would be an amazing, affordable service.
I really like it. My job is to keep tracks on what our competitors are doing, but I have always found it hard to pass on the wealth of information I pick up onto the marketing team for instance. With something like this, I could clip the most important articles to respective competitors and the marketing team can get as much or as little out of it as they wish - they could simply browse the articles at a time of their choosing to catch up with the most important news, or subscribe to an RSS feed for everything I post.
Sure, I could do all of this in something like del.icio.us, but 1) its a competitor product and 2) isnt specifically made for this purpose and as such can appear daunting to who I want to send the links to.
i’ve been using this for a while now, it’s really useful. i’m glad to see the developers are excited to keep updating it, seems like it has a ton of potential.
I think this is really cool - we’ve started using this for aggregating some of our m&a research and it works well; it woudl be good to be able to personalise/change the layout more - there’s often too much on a page and its focus on consumer based sites is a bit annoying … when you’re trying to track industrial/technology companies the website stats and blog feature are pretty irrelevant