With that live peek at the LITA Top Tech Trends panel I wrote about last time, I started to think what I would list as my top tech trend to watch. There’s no danger anyone would ask me to sit on such a panel, but it’s still fun to play along at home.

So here is my TTT for 2009:

Social software deathwatch

AOL Hometown shut down with very little notice to the people who still had their sites hosted there. Google is closing, stopping development or otherwise 86’ing Google Video, Notebook, Catalog Search, Jaiku, and Dodgeball (ReadWriteWeb article). LiveJournal laid off a bunch of people and sorta forgot to comment on it publicly for a while, leading people to suspect that they have something to hide and may not be long for this World Wide Web. Social bookmarking site, Ma.gnolia, had “data corruption and loss” on Friday, and at the moment they still haven’t recovered. (WebCite cached version of Ma.gnolia home page with apology and explanation.) Thomas Hawk has been blogging occasions (one, two) where Flickr permanently deleted users accounts with little notice or negotiation. (Please note that Hawk is CEO and Chief Evangelist [*gag* -ed.] of Zooomr, a Flickr competitor.)

I didn’t watch the whole LITA Top Tech Trends video, so it’s possible that the actual TTT panel talked about this. Karen Coombs certainly comes close with what she calls “the one which scares the sh!t out of me”: “The waking digital preservation nightmare.”

I admit that I’m conflating some not-entirely-related phenomena: sites where the owning company pulls the plug; sites that have one-time serious, possibly irrevocable losses; and sites that are too eager to not just suspend users’ accounts, but to delete everything they have posted.

But it goes back to something I wrote about two years ago in a post called When good sites go bad. It’s great to put stuff on these sites to increase your media’s visibility or to find a more convenient way to share documents or something. But what happens if your free hosted wiki site suddenly goes bankrupt or your document sharing site’s servers are accidentaly sold for scrap, or the video hosting site you use objects to the hot book-on-book action you have posted?

Jason Scott got me thinking about this again with a series of posts on his blog, ASCII: Eviction, or the Coming Datapocalypse, Stand Back, We’re Archivists, and Fuck the Cloud. (N.B.: If you are offended by that last post title, please don’t click any of the Jason Scott links. The man uses profanity like a Thai chef uses chiles; his writing might not sit well with those used to blander fare.) Scott is a self-made historian and archivist of the recent but rapidly receeding digital past. His stuff is provacative and fascinating, and I think you should read it all, but I’ll highlight two things here.

The first is Scott’s Archive Team, logo seen here. As he said in the “Eviction” post:

Our little technorati, our people who cry for open source and beg us for money to Fight For Electronic Freedom and make their rounds at all the right cocktail parties at tech shows.. where the hell are they now? We’re talking about terabytes, terabytes of data, of hundreds of thousands of man-hours of work, crafted by people, an anthropological bonanza and a critical part of online history, wiped out because someone had to show that they were cutting costs this quarter.

Archive Team is his answer to his own question, with the idea that the team will swoop in and back up (by any means necessary) users’ files on sites that are in danger of going under.

We might well ask the same question: libraries and librarians and archivists who care about preserving the world’s cultural output: where are we now? Do we have anything to add to an effort to help keep online culture from going down the drain. I fear that most libraries can barely deal with the digital content we are directly responsible for, leaving the wilds of the Internet to people like Scott and Brewster Kahle to deal with, but I’d love to hear examples of libraries taking on this kind of responsibility.

The other thing is a nice quote from the “Cloud” post:

If you want to take advantage of the froth, like with YouTube or so Google Video (oh wait! Google Video is going off the air!) then do so, but recognize that these are not Services. These are not dependable enterprises. These are parties. And parties are fun and parties and cool and you meet neat people at parties but parties are not a home.

(Note that Google Video isn’t “going off the air”; it’s discontinuing uploading of new content.)

So that’s my top tech trend for 2009. There’s a reason it’s called “cloud” computing. It looks beautiful now, but could be gone in a moment.

Edited 2009-02-04, noon MST to add: Walt Crawford is certainly talking about the same trends when he suggest that we consider sites’ business models before placing too much trust in them, and that we “should think several times before relying entirely on the cloud.” I knew I’d seen Walt mention these issues, but didn’t have a link when I wrote the post.