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The End of Free Web Services (Some of Them)

Posted by Sean | Posted under Ramblings | August 20, 2008

Mighty Bargain Hunter raises a good point re: Losing Free Web Services in a Recession. We lost a lot of web services during the last bust, maybe the majority of them. Although many of the ones that disappeared were not serving critical needs. We certainly did not lose Google. Yet undoubtedly there were people who lost a ton of their user-generated content. Either in non-essential services, or non-essential providers of essential services. Are any of your favorite web services in danger of disappearing?

Thinking of my own usage patterns, the upside of Google launching so many best-in-class services is they are relatively financial stable. Yahoo and MSN provide security in the short term, although I wonder about them long term with their constantly shifting priorities. But collectively, people think of these sites as an “FDIC of web services.” If a site is too useful to fail, it will find a home somewhere. Hmmm… probably true for many core services, but I wonder about the smaller websites.

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2 Comments so far
  1. jim of Blueprint for Financial Prosperity August 20, 2008 9:28 am

    Google will be fine with all these new apps, have you ever looked in their Labs section? They have a ton of cool little “not yet ready for prime time” apps in there.

  2. Curious Cat Investing and Economics Blog August 21, 2008 7:42 pm

    My strategy would be to only commit significant content to sites that are Open and allow easy backup of your content by you, in a form that is usable and that you control. Then you can move it wherever you want. Google does this in all their major services as far as I know. You can use GoogleDoc but you can save everything locally and if it is shut down you lose the service but not your content. You can also backup Blogger blogs…