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Google tells the New York Times a bit about its decision making: Wondered by Lively became deadly, Dodgeball got hit, and Notebook had its pages torn out? The New York Times details some of how Google looks at what works and what doesn't.

Three key elements: Can internal staff be recruited to work on the project in their official spare time (for projects that aren't top-down authorized)? Does the product work when Googlers use it (the dog-food test)? And is there a potential for a mass audience?

Jason Scott is pretty angry about the cavalier way in which AOL, among others, is shutting things down: My friend Chris Pepper forward a link to the Slashdot discussion of Scott's article in which he argues that some kind of eviction bill of rights is needed for digitally hosted material.

This might seem odd from a blog that pokes a little dark humor at service shutdowns, but it's perfectly fair that these operations halt: I was rather stunned at the vitriol aimed at Rael Dornfest, the owner of Values of N and operator of I Want Sandy and Stikkit. Dornfest wasn't charging for these services, but they were quite good at their purposes. He opted to take a job with Twitter, sell them his intellectual property, and shutter the site. (It's unclear in which order this happened, and whether Twitter required the sites being shuttered as part of the deal, nor does it particularly matter.)

This is just one example, but it's easy for folks to get proprietorial about sites they frequent. And it's a shame when that conflicts with financial realities. Rael (who I've known for several years, but not been in touch with recently) clearly didn't shut down his sites because they were popular and become an employee of an another company out of disinterest or spite. Rather, the sites clearly couldn't have been operated in a fashion that he felt would provide him a living and a return--and pay for the salaries of the necessary staff to run a commercial operation.

You can run a free site with niche functionality on a shoestring, but once you start charging, you're suddenly in a different class with different expectations, even if you outsource as much as you can and only offer business-hour email-only technical support.

Many people asked Rael in the thread I link above, why he didn't keep running the site; why Twitter didn't allow it to keep running (a supposition by posters); or why Rael didn't turn over his code to an open-source project or similar effort.

Frankly, it's Rael's bat and ball. I understand the frustration of people who invested time to use and improve his system, and who think that their testing contribution means that they have a stake in the outcome.

Maybe the scales need to fall off folks' eyes, but if you're helping a commercially oriented, closed-source project, you shouldn't ever count on your efforts being rewarded in any fashion, no matter how lovely or horrible the individuals involved.

I guess I learned this lesson about 13 years ago after contributing a huge amount of time in a beta test for a small company. When that firm was acquired, the developers got rich; I didn't even get a license for the product!

We all have to learn this lesson again. Open-source projects ensure at least some form of continuity or the ability of continuity outside the financial interests of individuals and corporations. Proprietary projects and sites with closed source or equivalent strictures won't reward you in the long run except insofar as they meet your current needs and continue to exist for their own purposes.

I've been trying to think why the growing number of hosted service shutdowns has affected me so viscerally. I expect it's because some percentage of customers of these services will not find about the imminent demise of their data until it's too late.

A good friend of mine had a chunk of her life in a storage locker in the Seattle area. She went to get something out of the locker and found the lock changed--and discovered that all the contents had been auctioned off as abandoned. I can't recall the precise details: a check had bounced? a letter had gone missing? The storage firm said they'd done all the right things, although obviously hadn't.

That's the way this feels. It's as if a storage center had said, "We're going out of business, and we'll be setting the contents of our building on fire. If you get here soon enough, you might be able to pull some stuff out of the blaze. And, by the way, we've taken the liberty of removing all the tags from your boxes, and your CDs from their cases."

Perhaps this may be a requirement after we reach the bottom of this downturn and climb our way up: that hosted service and storage firms may need to develop plans for their demise that are funded through a trust or escrow arrangement.

The next time someone says your data is safe with them because they use 1024-bit encryption and retinal scans of all employees, you might ask: what happens when you die?

Every day, another hosted service dies. Hosting isn't new technology: The commercial Internet started when service providers, existing and newcomers, began offering ways for other companies to make material available without building infrastructure in house. The growth of Web 2.0 as a basic site requirement, coupled with cloud this-and-that (cloud computing, cloud services, cloud storage), and software-as-a-service (SaaS) all mean that individuals, institutions, and firms of all sizes find themselves with more resources stored elsewhere that they rely on for personal memories or business operations.

I'm a journalist, and I find myself seeing every more announcements, often abrupt, from companies that run out of funding, as well as from firms like Google and AOL that decide to cut lose ventures that aren't panning out. In some cases, subscribers have hours to move their data; in others, the data is either stored in proprietary structures or ones that can't be exported...or there's no time to move anything. It's gone.

This site is a bit of a public service. I'll put some advertising on to support my time and own costs in operation, but I'm primarily focused on making sure that people who want a one-stop shop to capture the dead pool of Web and Internet services can subscribe to this feed.

Unlike the macabre phrase used throughout the book Carter Beats the Devil about a woman who apparently perished at the hands of a cruel man, "She never died," I'm here to bring you the bad news. It's dead, Jim.

It died.