Archive for June, 2008
Craigslist’s Child Sex: Who’s To Blame? [smcb]
Monday, June 30th, 2008
Prostitution on the Internet is hardly a new phenomenon, and shocking as it might be, child prostitution isn’t particularly a new problem in general, either. We’ve been doing the social media crime blotter series for a while now and I really haven’t touched on the prostitution angle in a big way up until this point because when you look at crime related stories in connection with social media, that is the noise you filter around.
So it isn’t particularly unexpected that CNN recently ran a fairly high profile “special investigation” into Craigslist and it’s role in the online sex trade. Generally, it’s very difficult to get brand new Craigslist CEO to comment on their erotic services section and the role it plays in the illegal business of paying for sex (underage or not), but he weighed in for the piece with a few choice words this time around:
Craigslist executives said they abhor the fact that their site is being used for child prostitution but believe that the problem could be harder to track if they removed the category. “It would be a bigger problem if we removed that category and had those ads spread throughout the site,” said Jim Buckmaster, chief executive officer of Craigslist.
In his response to CNN, Jim Buckland says that if the “erotic services” section remains in place, it makes it all the more easy to track illicit activity; if it’s all centralized, you can spot the illegal stuff more easily. He also made mention that Craigslist voluntarily works with authorities in tracking sexual crimes that have connection to the usage of their system.
If you look online into the places for responses to this assertion, two bloggers that cover this type of story regularly immediately spring to mind: ValleyWag’s Melissa Gira Grant and CraigsCrimeList’s Trench. Both bloggers provide two very disparate views of the continual onslaught of these types of incidents. In the case of CraigsCrimeList, Trench responds with:
“If you shut down the erotic services section of craigslist where would these ads go? Used cars? Furniture? Pets? Real Estate? You mean the places where people who don’t use hookers would actually see the ads and actually flag them?”
On the other hand, Melissa Gira Grant attempts to deflect the criticism to the site:
“Buckmaster certainly gives the role of concerned small businessman the appropriate gravitas, but it comes off as a little wooden. Personally, I would have pointed at Dave Elms, jailed proprietor of TheEroticReview and been all, “Why are we the focus of a scary CNN feature? Where’s the salacious magazine piece about that guy, Ms. De La Cruz?”
Taken in context of Melissa’s entire body of work, though, it’s clear that while she doesn’t support underage prostitution, she’s highly sympathetic and supportive to online sex workers. Meanwhile, Trench has traditionally taken the role of the critic, frequently citing cases that support his position that prostitution truly isn’t a victimless crime, and that it’s the responsibility of all social networks to take a more active role in clamping down, though Trench doesn’t give a free ride to the parents of delinquent children either.
The truth, as usual, is somewhere near the middle. A drum I continually beat here is that parents are responsible for their children (not only legally, but morally). If your child is selling herself as a prostitute online, then you as the parent bear far more responsibility for that than Craig or his list.
While I agree with Trench that if Craigslist were to take down the erotic services section, online sex trade on the site would likely halt instantly, there is nothing to prevent that same culture from migrating over to MySpace, Facebook, or any other number of very popular social networks that have dark corners that are difficult to police. It is a game of whack-a-mole, and just as it was pointless to take down all of the ALT.* hierarchy in USENET to eliminate a few child porn pictures, eliminating erotic services from Craigslist will do little to end online sex trade.
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Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:
Connecticut Attorney General Calls Out Craigslist For Selling Sex
Atlanta Requests Craigslist to Remove “Sex Ads”
Craigslist Adds Posting Fees in 4 More Cities
Craigslist Speaks Spanish, Too
Listpic Cut Off by Craigslist
eBay Sues Craiglist; Tired of Not Making Big Money?
Craigslist Sues eBay: Wants All its Shares Back.
Craigslist’s Child Sex: Who’s To Blame? [smcb]
Monday, June 30th, 2008
Prostitution on the Internet is hardly a new phenomenon, and shocking as it might be, child prostitution isn’t particularly a new problem in general, either. We’ve been doing the social media crime blotter series for a while now and I really haven’t touched on the prostitution angle in a big way up until this point because when you look at crime related stories in connection with social media, that is the noise you filter around.
So it isn’t particularly unexpected that CNN recently ran a fairly high profile “special investigation” into Craigslist and it’s role in the online sex trade. Generally, it’s very difficult to get brand new Craigslist CEO to comment on their erotic services section and the role it plays in the illegal business of paying for sex (underage or not), but he weighed in for the piece with a few choice words this time around:
Craigslist executives said they abhor the fact that their site is being used for child prostitution but believe that the problem could be harder to track if they removed the category. “It would be a bigger problem if we removed that category and had those ads spread throughout the site,” said Jim Buckmaster, chief executive officer of Craigslist.
In his response to CNN, Jim Buckland says that if the “erotic services” section remains in place, it makes it all the more easy to track illicit activity; if it’s all centralized, you can spot the illegal stuff more easily. He also made mention that Craigslist voluntarily works with authorities in tracking sexual crimes that have connection to the usage of their system.
If you look online into the places for responses to this assertion, two bloggers that cover this type of story regularly immediately spring to mind: ValleyWag’s Melissa Gira Grant and CraigsCrimeList’s Trench. Both bloggers provide two very disparate views of the continual onslaught of these types of incidents. In the case of CraigsCrimeList, Trench responds with:
“If you shut down the erotic services section of craigslist where would these ads go? Used cars? Furniture? Pets? Real Estate? You mean the places where people who don’t use hookers would actually see the ads and actually flag them?”
On the other hand, Melissa Gira Grant attempts to deflect the criticism to the site:
“Buckmaster certainly gives the role of concerned small businessman the appropriate gravitas, but it comes off as a little wooden. Personally, I would have pointed at Dave Elms, jailed proprietor of TheEroticReview and been all, “Why are we the focus of a scary CNN feature? Where’s the salacious magazine piece about that guy, Ms. De La Cruz?”
Taken in context of Melissa’s entire body of work, though, it’s clear that while she doesn’t support underage prostitution, she’s highly sympathetic and supportive to online sex workers. Meanwhile, Trench has traditionally taken the role of the critic, frequently citing cases that support his position that prostitution truly isn’t a victimless crime, and that it’s the responsibility of all social networks to take a more active role in clamping down, though Trench doesn’t give a free ride to the parents of delinquent children either.
The truth, as usual, is somewhere near the middle. A drum I continually beat here is that parents are responsible for their children (not only legally, but morally). If your child is selling herself as a prostitute online, then you as the parent bear far more responsibility for that than Craig or his list.
While I agree with Trench that if Craigslist were to take down the erotic services section, online sex trade on the site would likely halt instantly, there is nothing to prevent that same culture from migrating over to MySpace, Facebook, or any other number of very popular social networks that have dark corners that are difficult to police. It is a game of whack-a-mole, and just as it was pointless to take down all of the ALT.* hierarchy in USENET to eliminate a few child porn pictures, eliminating erotic services from Craigslist will do little to end online sex trade.
---
Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:
Connecticut Attorney General Calls Out Craigslist For Selling Sex
Atlanta Requests Craigslist to Remove “Sex Ads”
Craigslist Adds Posting Fees in 4 More Cities
Craigslist Speaks Spanish, Too
Listpic Cut Off by Craigslist
eBay Sues Craiglist; Tired of Not Making Big Money?
Craigslist Sues eBay: Wants All its Shares Back.
TWS2008 Announces 10 Winners
Monday, June 30th, 2008
Europe’s new Internet conference, TWS2008, is an exciting conference that takes place today (July 1st) in Tel Aviv, Israel. The conference is organized by the Israeli popular blog the.co.ils and aims to find and present the 10 most promising Internet startups in Israel.
Ten startups were chosen out of 100 that applied. The startups were selected by an impressive list of judges. Amongst them were Guy Kawasaki, our very own Pete Cashmore, Om Malik, Deborah Schultz, Brian Solis, Allen Stern, Chris Brogan, Yair Goldfinger, and Emily Chang. Today, the spotlight is on these 10 startups that were able to convince our judges that they have a unique offering to the world.
Here are the 10 winners:
Wix is an authoring platform that allows users to create striking and easy-to-build web content in flash (web sites, widgets, blogs etc), and publish it anywhere they want online. Users can create content without coding in flash/html or being constrained by templates. At the heart of the product is the drag & drop editor that allows users to pull in any content from the web or from their own media files (video, audio, animation, text etc) and create web content.
WorkLight develops and markets a line of server products that allow organizations to do more business securely using popular consumer Web 2.0 tools and technologies, like iGoogle, Windows Live, Netvibes, Facebook, and others. Through WorkLight, employees, channels, partners, and consumers connect to protected enterprise data (and to each other) using Web 2.0 services.
HiveSight helps marketers discover new facts about consumers. The technology sifts through and analyzes millions of social media profiles and blogs to construct consumer profiles. HiveSight’s customers use the online application to write simple queries that define consumer panels, and get instant reports on demographics, consumer interests, trends and more. It’s the fastest, easiest and most affordable way to explore consumer markets and discover new insights.
Qoof is the video commerce platform that bridges the world of Online Shopping, Internet Video, and Direct Response TV to create a distributed, targeted, and ersonalized video commerce network. Think QVC for the internet. The most powerful way to sell a product online is with video and as more merchants are looking for video solutions, the Qoof Platform is their answer.
WikiAnswers gives you useful answers about anything by harnessing people’s collective knowledge, but with a wiki-twist. The mission is to grow a collaborative answers resource; anyone can ask, answer or edit questions, building a global Q&A database covering all topics.
Dapper’s vision is to allow people to consume the web where, when and in whatever format they choose. Dapper users point and click on the content they want from a website, and Dapper turns this content into a live semantic feed that can be used in a variety of formats (RSS, widget, XML). Dapper is leveraging its core technology to create live content-based ads (MashupAds) that combine publisher and advertiser content within an interactive ad — creating the world’s first content ad network.
Mo’Minis is a revolutionary platform for the development and publishing of mobile games. The platform allows advanced as well as non-skilled developers to rapidly create original games from scratch and have them seamlessly supported on a wide range of handsets. Furthermore, developers can collaborate and share game assets on Mo’Minis developers’ community and enjoy distribution and monetization services through various on\off-deck channels.
Kaltura provides the first open-source video management platform, empowering any site with online video. With Kaltura, web publishers can seamlessly and cost-effectively integrate interactive and collaborative rich-media functionalities, including uploading, importing, editing, remixing, and sharing. Kaltura also offers its global network of publishers content hosting, transcoding, advertising, merchandising, and syndication.
MocoSpace is a mobile social network that allows anybody with a web-enabled phone to have a full social networking experience on their most trusted device, the mobile phone, whenever and wherever they want. Members Users enjoy expressing themselves and staying connected to friends by setting up a profile page, sharing photos and video, chatting, inboxing, instant messaging, blogging, debating in forums, sending mobile cards and playing games.
Nuconomy’s Studio is the world’s first “performance insight platform,” built from the ground up to provide completely new ways to measure today’s interactive Web. Go beyond the old page view model and start to measure the new metrics of the web – your users and site engagement and contribution metrics.
TWS2008 is honored to give the stage today to these promising startups and show the world how much Israeli technology has to offer.
In 2009, the conference plans to open the event to all European startups and to become the official European launch pad for Internet startups in the region.
For all those of you who are not in the area or haven’t registered to TWS2008, all videos wil be published the following day.
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Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:
Tomorrow in Tel Aviv: TWS2008
Google I/O Ticket Winners Announced
Webby Awards Winners Announced
Announcing the Winners of the Google I/O Ticket Giveaway
LG’s Video Contest Hosted on YouTube
Mashable.com Awarded Most Improved Blog
Firefox Extension Contest is On & Poppin’
Elite Tech News #13: Fishing in a Sea of Idiots [podcast]
Monday, June 30th, 2008
Happy Monday. You can stick a fork in the day now, it’s all over with. Time to sit down with a plate of tasty Elite Tech News.
The conversations we’ve been having on Elite Tech News keep getting more and more brilliant each week. This week we seemed to gravitate around the theme that politics, economics and technology are increasingly becoming inseparable. Certainly you can talk about app reviews all day long, and some times I do that. When you start factoring in the angle of the user experience, the access of the user, and the freedoms the user is allowed to have on those apps, you get dragged kicking and screaming back into issues of technology.
We started out with a nice filtered list of topics from the L33t Reddit filter, including:
Japanese Broadband Caps Compared To US Broadband Caps
Fail Whale Ate My Balls, Celebrate Twitter Downtime With Style
Keep Your Hands Off My Internet, Tesh!
Zappos hires robots to take over inventory floor
That quickly lead to us talking about the state-endorsed duopolies in the United States, and the effect that has on our usage and bandwidth caps, the sociological effects of robots replacing humans in the workplace, and why our political leaders should have a technical certification or two under their belt if they’re going to write tech policy.
Of course, we had our obligatory Twitter discussions, too, so there’s that to fast forward to, if you can’t stand policy discussions.
This week’s podcast panel consisted of myself in the lead chair along with myself, MG Siegler, and Steven Hodson and Art Lindsey doing his producer duties.
You can listen to the podcast below or download it from here to listen to later
Get the Elite Tech News podcast here
Add directly to iTunes here (or give us a rating)
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Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:
Elite Tech News #6: Where are My Pants?
Podcast: L33t Tech News
Elite Tech News #11: Hot Coffee Pod [podcast]
Elite Tech News #7: Explanatory Ninjas
Elite Tech News #9: The “C-Word” Symposium Featuring Robert Scoble
Elite Tech News #3: Cranky Bitchmemes
Elite Tech News #12: The How Depressing Episode [podcast]
Elite Tech News #13: Fishing in a Sea of Idiots
Monday, June 30th, 2008Happy Monday. You can stick a fork in the day now, it’s all over with. Time to sit down with a plate of tasty Elite Tech News.
The conversations we’ve been having on Elite Tech News keep getting more and more brilliant each week. This week we seemed to gravitate around the theme that politics, economics and technology are increasingly becoming inseparable. Certainly you can talk about app reviews all day long, and some times I do that. When you start factoring in the angle of the user experience, the access of the user, and the freedoms the user is allowed to have on those apps, you get dragged kicking and screaming back into issues of technology.
We started out with a nice filtered list of topics from the L33t Reddit filter, including:
Web 2.0: Enough with the parties, where is the innovation?
Japanese Broadband Caps Compared To US Broadband Caps
Fail Whale Ate My Balls, Celebrate Twitter Downtime With Style
Keep Your Hands Off My Internet, Tesh!
Zappos hires robots to take over inventory floor
That quickly lead to us talking about the state-endorsed duopolies in the United States, and the effect that has on our usage and bandwidth caps, the sociological effects of robots replacing humans in the workplace, and why our political leaders should have a technical certification or two under their belt if they’re going to write tech policy.
Of course, we had our obligatory Twitter discussions, too, so there’s that to fast forward to, if you can’t stand policy discussions.
This week’s podcast panel consisted of myself in the lead chair along with myself, MG Siegler, and Steven Hodson and Art Lindsey doing his producer duties.
You can listen to the podcast below or download it from here to listen to later
Get the Elite Tech News podcast here
Add directly to iTunes here (or give us a rating)
---
Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:
Elite Tech News #6: Where are My Pants?
Podcast: L33t Tech News
Elite Tech News #11: Hot Coffee Pod [podcast]
Elite Tech News #7: Explanatory Ninjas
Elite Tech News #9: The “C-Word” Symposium Featuring Robert Scoble
Elite Tech News #3: Cranky Bitchmemes
Elite Tech News #12: The How Depressing Episode [podcast]
Elite Tech News #13: Fishing in a Sea of Idiots
Monday, June 30th, 2008Happy Monday. You can stick a fork in the day now, it’s all over with. Time to sit down with a plate of tasty Elite Tech News.
The conversations we’ve been having on Elite Tech News keep getting more and more brilliant each week. This week we seemed to gravitate around the theme that politics, economics and technology are increasingly becoming inseparable. Certainly you can talk about app reviews all day long, and some times I do that. When you start factoring in the angle of the user experience, the access of the user, and the freedoms the user is allowed to have on those apps, you get dragged kicking and screaming back into issues of technology.
We started out with a nice filtered list of topics from the L33t Reddit filter, including:
Web 2.0: Enough with the parties, where is the innovation?
Japanese Broadband Caps Compared To US Broadband Caps
Fail Whale Ate My Balls, Celebrate Twitter Downtime With Style
Keep Your Hands Off My Internet, Tesh!
Zappos hires robots to take over inventory floor
That quickly lead to us talking about the state-endorsed duopolies in the United States, and the effect that has on our usage and bandwidth caps, the sociological effects of robots replacing humans in the workplace, and why our political leaders should have a technical certification or two under their belt if they’re going to write tech policy.
Of course, we had our obligatory Twitter discussions, too, so there’s that to fast forward to, if you can’t stand policy discussions.
This week’s podcast panel consisted of myself in the lead chair along with myself, MG Siegler, and Steven Hodson and Art Lindsey doing his producer duties.
You can listen to the podcast below or download it from here to listen to later.
Get the Elite Tech News podcast here
Add directly to iTunes here (or give us a rating)
---
Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:
Elite Tech News #6: Where are My Pants?
Podcast: L33t Tech News
Elite Tech News #11: Hot Coffee Pod [podcast]
Elite Tech News #7: Explanatory Ninjas
Elite Tech News #9: The “C-Word” Symposium Featuring Robert Scoble
Elite Tech News #3: Cranky Bitchmemes
Elite Tech News #12: The How Depressing Episode [podcast]
Keep Rocking: 30+ Sites for Free & Legal Music
Monday, June 30th, 2008
Downloading illegal music has become a hot topic on the Web. So much so that it’s easy to forget about the plethora of sites dedicated to free, legal music. We’ve put together a list of 30+ sites that will keep your MP3 player playing until your batteries are completely drained.
Whether you’re into pop, jazz, metal or classical, there’s something here for everyone. Let us know which are your favorites.
Amazon MP3 Store - The vast majority of the music at Amazon is for sale, but they do have a rotation of free tracks available for download.
AmieStreet.com - Focused on promoting new and independent music, their downloads range from free to $0.98 as they grow in popularity.
Archive.org - An enormous collection of public domain music, expired copyright tracks, as well as some free contemporary music.
ArtistServer.com - It started off as a resource for independent electronic musicians, but is now open to all. All tracks can be downloaded for free.
BeSonic.com - Offers over 13,000 free tracks from mostly European acts.
BetterPropaganda.com - A music webzine covering hundreds of music labels, and offering thousands of free & legal songs for you to download.
CCMixter.org - a site dedicated to music that you can download to remix and post your results, all under the Creative Commons license.
Download.com - Most people think CNet’s Download.com is just about software, but they also have tens of thousands of free MP3s you can download from new as well as up and coming bands.
Epitonic.com - A large selection of free tracks from smaller record companies that are free to download with larger releases available for purchase.
EZ-Tracks.com - Offers over 30,000 legal downloads that are managed through a partnership with the labels. Starts you off with credit for 101 free upon registering.
FreeAlbums.blogsome.com - A blog that posts reviews of complete albums that are available for free downloads from numerous sources.
GarageBand.com - Independent bands can upload their music, then have it rated by users, as well as downloaded for free.
Imeem.com - Features streaming music from all of the major labels as well as numerous smaller companies, with numerous free downloadable tracks.
ItsFreeDownloads.com - Finding the free downloads on iTunes can be a chore, this site does the work for you and lets you know what’s free each week.
Jamendo.com - Artists upload their albums under Creative Commons, allowing new listeners to discover their work. Although free, there is the opportunity to donate to the performers of your choice.
Last.fm - While most people know Last.fm for its streaming and social aspects, they offer a weekly chart of downloadable free mp3s.
LegalTorrents.com - Proving that not all BitTorrent activity is illegal, LegalTorrents is filled with completely legal material.
Live Music Archive - Part of Archive.org, features thousands of live performances by smaller bands as well as the likes of the Grateful Dead and Jason Mraz.
MetalHordes.com - A band promotion site focusing on various forms of heavy metal, and allowing bands to upload mp3s users can download for free.
MP3.com - Besides their paid section, MP3.com does offer a large selection of free tracks from acts small and large alike.
MP3.com.au - Focusing on Australian bands, mp3.com.au offers a repository for bands to upload their music for people to download and try for free.
MP34U - Works in conjunction with Muzic.com, this site finds sources of free music & legal music from all over the Web.
MP3Raid.com - Searches multiple sources to bring you approximately a million free song downloads.
Muzic.com - A sister site to MP34U, wherein the artists upload their tracks themselves, and muzic.com helps them promote their work.
Purevolume.com - Allows independent musicians to set up profiles for themselves, stream their music and gives them the option of enabling their work for free downloads.
Ruckus.com - Ruckus provides free music to people with .edu email addresses, and requires you to renew your licenses for DRM once a year.
SoundClick.com - Offering a mixture of signed and unsigned artists the opportunity to set up profile pages and either stream their music or offer it up for free downloads.
SpiralFrog.com - Major release albums and tracks available for the price of just watching some advertisements.
Stereogum.com - Daily free mp3s from various artists, as well as rotating free albums.
TuneShout.com - A site for independent artists to promote themselves. Artists can upload tracks either for free or at a user cost of $0.89.
We7.com - We7 offers mp3 downloads for free, but they do have advertisements attached to them. If you want them without the ads, they do offer a paid alternative.
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FriendFeed Launches iPhone Compatibility
Monday, June 30th, 2008
The feature that Mashable’s Stan Schroeder has been “waiting for his whole life” launches today: it’s an iPhone version of FriendFeed. The announcement was made earlier today on FriendFeed’s blog, and there isn’t much difference noticable from the regular web version - just a specialized interface, a few more gradients, and more readable type for the smaller screen size.
For those of you who don’t like pretty things, there’s also an easy way to revert back to the default view.
It’s definitely a wise strategic move with the impending release of the iPhone 3G, a much sought after set of eyeballs for communication and community. There are a number of developers working on Twitter clients and clones to capitalize on the new influx of iPhone users in the hopes to capture some early adopter evangelism, but the biggest competitor to FriendFeed might just be … FriendFeed.
No news from Shane Vitarana has been heard lately on it, but back in April he announced he was working on a FriendFeed native application, but subsequently clamped up on things due to a restrictive non-disclosure agreement with Apple.
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Has Google Changed the Ad Network Landscape — Again?
Monday, June 30th, 2008
Last night Google announced that they would be distributing webisodes from Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane via their AdSense publisher network, but as a news item it didn’t strike a particular chord with me at the time. Then I read a post this morning by Eric Berlin over at Online Media Cultist.
As I read Eric’s piece bells started going off in my head; and no I was not suffering from auditory hallucinations, but if you have read the same post then you should have been hearing the same thing. The idea that Google would be making available content that is unique and something that people will want to watch — after all who doesn’t like watching cartoons — via their AdSense network, is in my opinion something of a game changer for the ad business. These 30 second spots are supposed to come with pre-roll ads and given who is creating them, you almost have to be assured they will be popular, even if only because they are something new.
Yes, other companies have tried the route of video ads but the problem with them is that that is exactly what they are, ads. For most folks video ads are no different than the banner and text ads that came before them and most likely readers are tuning them out in the exact same way. What Google is doing is totally different in that they are giving us something of value, if only a laugh in exchange for an ad being displayed just prior to the cartoon. This is truly unique and I believe could take off just as AdSense did when it was introduced.
I would have preferred that some company other than Google had introduced the concept, if only because Google already controls too much of ad space on the Internet. Unfortunately though for something like this to work you would need a distribution network already in place and Google has that in spades. Other companies also would have had a hard time attracting a talent like MacFarlane and would have needed time to build up a distribution network. In that case, the path to profitability would have been delayed. With Google it will just be a matter of offering another option for their AdSense members and they will be away to the bank.
Did this latest move by Google just change the whole ad landscape? I think so. Is it a good thing? On that I am not so sure, but I don’t think so. Will it succeed? Probably.
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Web Hosting? What Web Hosting?
Monday, June 30th, 2008The folks over at Royal Pingdom have discovered an interesting trend: Google Trends shows that the number of searches for both “web hosting” and “hosting” has decreased quite rapidly in the past few years.
This could be for any number of reasons, as they’ve noticed in the post: change of terminology, or people using sources other than Google to find about web hosting.
My guess, though, is that web hosting is just no longer an issue for most users. Remember the Internet 5 or 10 years ago? If you wanted to start any kind of project on the Internet, no matter how small, the first thing everyone told you was to find a good web host. Now, you can do a whole lot of stuff without ever having to worry about web hosting. Want to create a gallery? Flickr. Blog? Wordpress. Post videos? Youtube. Web hosting is there, somewhere underneath it all, but you don’t need to worry about it - just like you don’t have to worry about having electricity.
It’s a logical course of events. The end users don’t have to worry about the sheer foundations of the Internet any more; they can focus on a specific service they need and let the provider worry about the hosting and other “unimportant” details.
In fact, I’ve checked out what Google Trends says about some other services that once seemed to be growing unstoppably. “Web design,” for example, is on an even sharper decline. “Photo sharing” and “video sharing,” however, are doing better than ever, and “social networking“, you guessed it, is on an even steeper incline.
This doesn’t mean that these services are no longer needed; it merely means that the majority of users don’t need to know about them, just like they don’t need to know about the intricacies of the way their 16 valve car engine burns fuel. On the Internet, however, these large scale changes are happening faster than in other industries; if you’re building an Internet business, you better be willing to adapt fast.
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