I propose a game. Predict which of the following Web 2.0 sites will be out of business one year from now, on November 12, 2009:
- Pandora
- Flickr (owned by Yahoo)
- YouTube (owned by Google)
- MySpace (owned by NewsCorp)
- Hulu (owned NewsCorp/NBC Universal)
I picked these eight sites in part because they are all smart, successful, dynamic sites that most of us are pulling for. What concerns me is that they basically follow the same business plan: Let’s build something really cool, give it away for free, and figure out how to make money off it later. Difficulty: Recession. Later is sooner than we thought.
Consider how you would feel if you fired up your computer one day and found that one of these sites – say, Flickr or Facebook – had closed, and the data you shared with them was inaccessible and about to be erased. I got to thinking about this because of a story I wrote at work yesterday about a technology provider for photographers that suddenly shut down.
I sure don’t wish anyone out of a job, but realistically, I think some things are about to start crashing back down to Earth. My predictions are in the comments.





