I don't think it proves your point. Almost everyone has an analogous service competing against them, either because "great minds think alike" and other people n

I don't think it proves your point. Almost everyone has an analogous service competing against them, either because "great minds think alike" and other people noticed the same need around the same time (e.g. digg v. reddit) or because they heard of someone else doing it and thought it was a great idea they could jump in on. I listed Facebook and Twitter, but I could have gone on, there are many services that were once dominant and got overtaken by something that is functionally equivalent or even functionally worse, but had more attractive dressing that drew users in. The things that caused Facebook to spread like wildfire were not "twists" or enhanced value propositions highlighted in marketing material, nor were they Facebook's raison d'etre. If we're being honest, the most probable reason Facebook came into being despite Friendster, MySpace, etc., was not some analysis of the marketplace, but it was probably as simple as Zuckerberg had some of the code sitting around from his failed contract with the Winklevosses, and he got a kick out of people submitting their profiles to his service. Not much of a twist there. Facebook exploded basically by accident, and the rest is history. There's no reason that the next Facebook couldn't have a similar history. The gist of what I'm saying is that "the twist" or the killer feature(s) or whatever you want to call the things that drive adoption are less announced (e.g., as the reason your startup exists) and more accidentally discovered, happened upon. That process of discovery occurs by a segment of applications entering the marketplace and iterating based on what they see their competitors doing and what they see their customers responding to. It's hard to know a priori just what combination of tweaks is going to excel out in the marketplace, so several competitors that don't have a unique value proposition (aka "twist") are valid. Any one could eventually stumble into a formula that allows them to win and overtake the incumbent.