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:

1. Facebook
2. Twitter
3. Pandora
4. LinkedIn
5. Flickr (owned by Yahoo)
6. YouTube (owned by Google)
7. MySpace (owned by NewsCorp)
8. 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.

Friends have asked me what I’m doing about my 401K fund, given the recent performance of the stock market. I obviously have no qualifications to give people financial advice, but here’s my answer: I’m doing nothing differently. I’m going to keep contributing a few percent every paycheck and direct most of it to stock investments. For somebody like me (who won’t retire for another 35 or 40 years), there’s no sense in getting stressed about the markets. After all, there are only two possible scenarios:

1. Stocks will go back up. Even if it takes 20 years, it’s going to work in our favor in the long run.

2. Stocks will never go back up. The American economy reached its peak in 2007 and it’s all downhill from here. Soon we’ll be withdrawing dollars from the bank and burning them as a source of warmth.

In either scenario, you’re not going to benefit by fiddling with your 401K investments right now. The best and worst thing about 401Ks (vs. pensions) is that the individual employee controls his or her own retirement fund. We all knew there were risks to this system when we bought into it. Now we have to have the discipline and patience to let the system work for us. Stay the course. Ignore Jim Cramer.

It’s become popular among politicians and TV journalists to ask when the economic pain on Wall Street will be felt on “Main Street.” Take a drink every time you hear somebody say “Main Street” during the debate tonight.

I have a problem with this metaphor. For most ordinary folks, if there even is a “Main Street” in their town, it was totally decimated by Wal-Mart in the 1990s. Main Streets are vestiges from a time before interstates, when dense towns formed organically around crossroads, harbors and train stations. No more. New developments in the suburbs are built without any kind of central business district. If you still have a downtown, it’s probably not a place you hang out. There’s a good bet it’s limping along with a few struggling offices and maybe a weird old barber shop.

The way people live now, home is a cul-de-sac. Business is conducted in a shopping center or an office park a 15-minute drive away on a six-lane divided highway. Mailboxes Etc. or FedEx Kinkos has replaced the Post Office, Amazon or Barnes & Noble has replaced the book store, Safeway or Kroger has replaced most other food shops. Nobody walks anywhere.

So perhaps your town has no soul. But there’s a good unintended consequence to all this. When all your local businesses are part of national chains, they can ride out a few years of a bad economy. Home Depot, Costco and McDonald’s are going to be fine.

So if not Main Street, where will economic trouble cause the most pain in small towns and cities? I think school districts. Schools are localized. They rely largely on local property taxes, bond issues and mutual fund investments for income. We’ve let the businesses in our towns grow huge, national and powerful, but left our public schools in a precarious situation.

Here are the “trending topics” on Twitter at this moment:

• DOW
• Bailout
• Wall Street
• Republicans
• Congress
• Black Monday
• Bush
• Wachovia
• GOP
• Dems

“I used to live next door to a Russian émigré. One day he asked me to explain something that puzzled him about his new country. ‘This place seems very rich,’ he said, ‘but I never see anyone making anything. How does the country earn its money?’ The answer, these days, is that we make a living by selling each other houses.”

- Paul Krugman in The New York Times, August 12, 2005.

So this is what they’ve been doing with our 401(k) money. Raise your hand if you regret ticking the “moderately aggressive” box.

My 401(k), planned quite carefully to grow over the long term, is down 6.1 percent for the year. Anybody beating that?

Bummer!