Today I was ( still am ) sitting at Brad Webb’s doing some work for V:social he told me to check out a new ( newish? ) “microblogging” site called tumblr ( lol trendy web 2.0 name ). Tumblr is a half blog and half aggregator. It allows users to add their RSS feed, Flickr, Del.icio.us, Digg ,Twitter, Last.fm, WordPress.com, VOX, Blogger, LiveJournal, and YouTube accounts and have them displayed in one easy to view location. It was quick to set up, under about 30 seconds and very easy to get the feeds added to it. The whole set up time and usage took around 2 minutes. Check out my tumblr: http://problem.tumblr.com/.
Kinda cool, but this got me to thinking, there are a hell of a lot services based off of one or two services ( the internet, skynet 2.0? ). For example there are countless services that rely on twitter as a key component of their service. So what happens if twitter shuts down? Do the services that had once relied on twitter try to find another service to use? Or do they die as well, falling like a house of cards.
Now what if we take it to the extreme, Google. There are even more companies that rely on Google’s services. What if one day the Internet Giant was no more? What would people do? Is there comparable services to AdSense, Google Maps, GMail, Gdocs, Youtube? I guess there are a few companies that could fill this gap but would the cost associated with redeploying compatible site be to much for a start-up to handle?
Are companies and users alike putting all of their eggs in one basket? Time will tell. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that companies shouldn’t do this, it’s been a successful business model thus far. I’m just saying that people should be cautious of the possibilities.
