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A fork in the road - dangers of web services

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justice:
Today's news brings up the risk of continuity of webservices:
Today marks a fork in the road for this particular startup. Values of n, the company behind Stikkit and I Want Sandy, will be closing its doors. Both services will going offline at close of business (5pm PST) on Monday December 8th, 2008. Until then, they'll be up and running as usual to allow our users time to make the transition, find alternative services, and download any data they wish to take with them.

While the company and services will be shutting down, Stikkit and Sandy's DNA will live on; the intellectual property behind both has been acquired by Twitter, Inc.

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from Daring Fireball

As one of the comments says:
Blogger Tom said...    I don't think it's wrong to say "You got me addicted to your service like crack cocaine, and now you're telling me to go to very poor alternatives which are nowhere near as powerful."

    I don't like being told "it was free, so deal with it". If Google decided to close Gmail and delete all your mail in 10 days, would you have no right to be mad because it was "free"? Of course you would. It's a very poor excuse.
--- End quote ---

As users will become wiser of web services and more of these will be bought up / close down - will this ultimately undermine confidence in web services? What guarantees should be in place? Should the webservice become open source or an read only archive be created when it will no longer be supported? It shows that the webservice industry is still growing up in my opinion.

As a person who earns a living (indirectly) with the web, it's a valid concern.

mouser:
Not only is it a valid concern, but it's a business model.

This is one of the reasons why people like me are extremely reluctant to use these (often) free web services.. the prospect of them closing up shop and leaving you and your data in limbo seems quite high -- and it seems like it's often part of the business model.

Basically a company creates a web service and get as many people using it as possible by keeping it free.  [as a side note, make sure to call it "In Beta" forever so no one can complain about anything] They don't worry about profits yet.  Then at some point they say we have all these users, now is there a way to make a profit on it -- via advertising or whatever.  If not, then just close up shop and move on.  And the user is out of luck.

Carol Haynes:
It isn't just free web-services either - what is to stop paid for services being sold and shut down? It has happened a lot to software titles - but at least you keep the version you have paid for - with a web service you get to keep nothing.

f0dder:
Data on harddisk = <3.
Data in the cloud = </3

I'm never going to rely on having important data (solely) on the web if I can help it.

Stoic Joker:
I'm never going to rely on having important data (solely) on the web ... Unless the server it's hosted on is phyically mine.

Tis an Evil Cloud coming me thinks.

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