Unless you are actively seeking a particular solution or invest enough time looking at hosted Web applications like I do (once per quarter over the last nine quarters I’ve looked at nearly every Web hosted application on the major lists), then you’ll undoubtedly miss seeing huge value Web applications like One True Media (OTM).

A friend had a specific business objective in mind and went on the hunt for a solution that would fit his need. He searched in vain and one day I happened to be doing my once-per-quarter surfing of sites and came across OTM and sent him the link.

“It’s absolutely PERFECT!” he exclaimed and ended up choosing and aligning around it. Helping him out with communications and training around his initiative, I’ve spent significantly more time within OTM than I have using its competitors (e.g., Scrapblog, Vuvox, Flektor and Animoto), but I’ve been stunned with OTM’s features, the “fit and finish” of the application, and how it is perfect for consumers interested in putting together mashed-up montages of video, images, music, and text slides. The bonus is inserting that finished creation either within a theme or not and then having the option to embed it in their social network/blog/website or to make a DVD (for a full review of OTM, see the excellent one done by one of the most under-appreciated and best reviewers of technology on the planet, Robin Good, here).

But will OTM survive? Will all of the ones I mentioned above in this category be able to survive as it becomes easier and cheaper to create and deliver hosted Web applications and thus competitors to arrive in this space?

I’m using OTM as a “poster child” for what I see as THE biggest issue of our new, social media/Web application/Internet-centric world: there are so many phenomenally good and valuable offerings out there that it’s almost impossible to be discovered and build critical mass needed to survive — and this problem is only going to get worse as utility computing accelerates making it easier-n-easier for competitors to appear.

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