Exactly. It would seem that one of the biggest problems facing the Internet and the growing dependence on Internet based services/applications is the fact that

Exactly. It would seem that one of the biggest problems facing the Internet and the growing dependence on Internet based services/applications is the fact that you are often fully dependent on (and at the mercy of) a single fallible system. If our next generation of web services/applications relied on (is designed to be) a "cloud" based system, capable of dynamically switching between the multiple available services of a specific type, your users could rely on your service, regardless of what a single given service's stability or status is - one goes down, another one picks up. *trivial example: Think Twitter outages - if there was instead a redundant vanilla twitter-like messaging system, outages would not impact usability of its applications... This said, I cannot help but wonder about the fiscal reality of such a infrastructure. In 'narrowing the delivered content more specifically to match the actual desired data' and 'its delivery mechanism' being hammered out, I can't help but wonder about the 'pay off'? Where is the mechanism that allows "content owners" to 'brand' and/or capitalize on "their" data. But that is a different discussion altogether...