>I was interested in building something like this when COVID-19 first hit.
Same here. I spent a panicked month and a half on full-time pre-production for a competing product in this space, as an unfortunate alternative to seeking a job at the time.
>There are currently at least 18 projects operating in this space.
https://theonline.town/ is missing from your list. There's probably half a dozen more I could add if my notes from the time were properly organized.
Please don't feel bad of course: we've reached a point where full quantification of all non-stealth competitors in a busy space is very difficult, if not impossible. Indeed, your list has projects I was previously unaware of.
>I think it's still a space with a lot of potential, but there are now a huge number of competitors.
The number of competitors was staggering. It felt like a veritable gold rush: almost every single novel design concept I came up with was eventually independently thought of, but nobody ever wove each together into something truly cohesive. Heck, even the name was jokingly thought of by some random person on Twitter months later.
>I still think that there's a lot of potential for someone to come in and take over this whole space with a product more polished than is possible in the browser,
I don't think the browser as a platform is an issue; it's extremely capable. There's just a huge amount of apathy and entrenchment in that space now, and the usual rules pertaining to software moats apply just the same. It'd have to be something really special to unseat Zoom and all its clones at this point.
>I suspect that the winning team will come from the ranks of game developers, not webdevs who cracked open a webrtc tutorial one weekend
Having watched endless projects borne of weekend WebRTC tutorials spring up during that time period, I cannot agree more.
Same here. I spent a panicked month and a half on full-time pre-production for a competing product in this space, as an unfortunate alternative to seeking a job at the time.
>There are currently at least 18 projects operating in this space.
https://theonline.town/ is missing from your list. There's probably half a dozen more I could add if my notes from the time were properly organized.
Please don't feel bad of course: we've reached a point where full quantification of all non-stealth competitors in a busy space is very difficult, if not impossible. Indeed, your list has projects I was previously unaware of.
>I think it's still a space with a lot of potential, but there are now a huge number of competitors.
The number of competitors was staggering. It felt like a veritable gold rush: almost every single novel design concept I came up with was eventually independently thought of, but nobody ever wove each together into something truly cohesive. Heck, even the name was jokingly thought of by some random person on Twitter months later.
>I still think that there's a lot of potential for someone to come in and take over this whole space with a product more polished than is possible in the browser,
I don't think the browser as a platform is an issue; it's extremely capable. There's just a huge amount of apathy and entrenchment in that space now, and the usual rules pertaining to software moats apply just the same. It'd have to be something really special to unseat Zoom and all its clones at this point.
>I suspect that the winning team will come from the ranks of game developers, not webdevs who cracked open a webrtc tutorial one weekend
Having watched endless projects borne of weekend WebRTC tutorials spring up during that time period, I cannot agree more.