what happens when web2.0 is down?

whether you care for the buzzwords or not, sites on the internet these days are doing a lot more than ever before. consequently they are much more complicated not only to build, but to maintain and just plain keep online. believe me, we run a site or two at bryght and it has it’s challenges. there’s a whole lot of activity going on in a two-way data flow (syndication, aggregation, web service transactions, etc…). the web feels much more, well… entangled.

so, what happens when pieces fall off the map? what if they’re big pieces?

case in point, two services that i use heavily every day del.icio.us and bloglines have been offline for extended periods today (planned in the case of the latter- but still).

certainly, the world is not ending, nor am I particularly upset. I understand it happens all too well. but there are those (and I’d consider myself amongst them) who see this trend of inter-conneted sites publishing and subscribing to each other’s data as the future. but, in my (rarely humble) opinion, we need to be really careful about where our data lives. certainly levels lower in the stack have always had to worry about this. and the internet is a big, resilient place. certainly, if say flickr were to disappear and never return it wouldn’t be the end of the world right? I mean, we all paid for DVD backups of all our pictures, right? we could just re-upload, re-tag, re-instate that community somewhere else. no problem, right? yikes.

there’s a lot to be said for decentralization.