Have you ever thought up of an idea for a site and think, wow this has never been done before that I know of and then suddenly found that actually it has been done, not once but over and over and over again.

Some days I wish that I could go back to the start of the dot com boom (i was a kid back then mind) and be at that point where if you created something new, which was very easy to do back then, then you could become and instant success. Sadly, this isn’t the case.

From January to March this year I was working on a site called showthatportfolio, which offered artists and designers a place to showcase their work with the outcome being that they would receive contracts from clients who have viewed their portfolio. When I started I did a bit of research and I looked around for sites that were similar and the only one I found was DeviantArt which was a great site but didn’t have that aspect of getting contracts as their main focus. So I spent three hard months putting together showthatportfolio learning PHP/MySQL on the way.

Eventually it came to launch day and I got people going to it and people signed up, added their work and started using the site. Then after the first day things started to die and kept on dying, below are the visitor statistics since launch:

Not too great as you can see.

So, today I sat down for a good hour trying to think of an idea for a new site, I thought long and hard and whenever I came up with an idea I googled it and everytime there was a site already there. Doing a search for social network gives 33 million websites. The internet is overcrowded with social networks and web 2.0 sites. It has even got to the point where sites are turning to TV advertising, the amount of sites I am seeing for comparing car insurance and meeting people is ridiculous.

Is the internet boom over, what are your opinions on this?