It goes into the bit bucket, of course.

Yahoo’s announcement that it will be closing GeoCities raises concerns about the permanence and persistence of the information we entrust to others.  Their announcement follows other closings–Digital Railroad and Pownce, to mention a couple.

GeoCities has been around forever (figuratively, but nearly true in Internet years) and its product is web-pages–a base pair in the DNA of the Internet/Web.  GeoCities’s disappearance later this year begs the question, what else could be at risk once enough time goes by and a company decides it can no longer afford to foot the bill for your data…

Google’s sequential quarters of declining revenue coupled with the observation that e-mail is not the communication medium of choice for Millennials and younger, make me wonder if/when Google will become responsible for stewarding over a huge chunk of data with very low utility.

Twitter still hasn’t figure out how to make money and they’re $35M into investor’s money.  A big bailout in the form of acquisition is almost certainly their strategy now; but Google’s down, Microsoft’s down, Yahoo’s down (clearly), and Facebook has valuation problems of its own.  Old-timers (early adopters) have years of their history stored in the Twitter data cloud.

MySpace hasn’t played out as expected for News Corporation and their deal with Google ends soon.  What happens when Rupert Murdoch decides to jettison and underperforming property?

What about Flickr, YouTube, Mint…?

Luckily the bit bucket is linked to /dev/null (never gets full).

Today I learned that Pownce will be going away. It sounds like they are trying to do the right thing by their users–providing an export function and moving Pro users to a free TypePad account.

Pownce will soon join a growing pool of once hot/promising Web 2.0 startups and technologies who have gone under–victims of the current financial crisis or market apathy.

More distubing than the news of Pownce is the story of Digital Railroad.  From the sound of it, more than one photographer lost his/her data in this fiasco.

If you slice 7oz of organic turkey breast into seven slices, you make it impossible for consumers to make more than one sandwich with exactly the same number of slices from exactly one package based on some reasonable number of slices (like two or three… or five).