In a blog post from 2006 titled, " The Art of Driving Your Competition Crazy ," Silicon Valley venture capitalist Guy Kawasaki wrote, "you cannot drive your competition crazy unless you understand their strengths and weaknesses." Kawasaki undoubtedly knows what he's talking about, and his advice - while almost 4 years old - still rings true today. If you've got a great idea for a startup, knowing as much about your potential competitors is invaluable, and the people behind Competitious know this as well as anyone. That's why they created their handy application for keeping close tabs on the competition. Sponsor Developed by RivalSoft, the makers of RivalMap , Competitious is a free service that allows users to collaborate on numerous projects for tracking industry competitors. You and your team can gather and collect news clips, build feature comparison matrices and keep an eye on traffic trends with Alexa data. The comparison matrix feature is very useful and we here at ReadWriteWeb are even putting this feature to use in researching an upcoming report. However, entering in individual features for each company can become a bit tedious. It would have been nice to see Competitious offer a list of popular companies whose core features could be automatically placed into a matrix. Users would also benefit from suggested competiors for any given company based on what other users are comparing, but perhaps these features are on Competitious' roadmap for the future. The traffic graphs can only be seen if your competitors are ranked in the top 100,000 on Alexa, which can be a problem for small business with equally small competition. Competitious does claim, however, that they are working on "a much more robust traffic system" for their post-beta release. In the meantime, free site analytics services like Compete and Quantcast can provide data for those hard-to-reach sites. Despite its early flaws, with the ability to easily compare any number of companies in a side-by-side fashion, Competitious is a convenient solution for researching that "competitors" slide in your startup's pitch presentation. Discuss

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Know Thy Enemy: Competitious Helps You Stay Ahead

These days, everyone is talking about social media and discussing what services and tools to use, how to use them, why you should use them, etc. In fact, if you listened to all the advice out there, you would probably think that no matter who you are, whether an individual wanting to build a personal brand, or a large multinational corporation intent on communicating with customers, you should be using social media. But is social media for everyone? Are there times when you shouldn't be using it at all? Sponsor Editor's note: This story is part of a series we call Redux, where we'll re-publish some of our best posts of 2009. As we look back at the year - and ahead to what next year holds - we think these are the stories that deserve a second glance. It's not just a best-of list, it's also a collection of posts that examine the fundamental issues that continue to shape the Web. We hope you enjoy reading them again and we look forward to bringing you more Web products and trends analysis in 2010. Happy holidays from Team ReadWriteWeb! According to B&B, a magazine for marketing strategists, there are definitely some scenarios when social media should be avoided. In a recent article , they listed what these were: You're in a high-ticket business: