Jakob predicts that web services will spell the end of homemade websites. Though he misses the obvious huge example, I think he’s probably right to an extent. But on every project, you have to guage the importance of the requirements and whether spooging those into a pre-built solution is acceptable. For example, I use PicoSearch for search functionality on my Dahl site. It’s not ideal, but it’s not enough of a priority for me to expend the time and energy to write something myself. But for both RDF and w-g, I decided that I needed to write my own database-driven blogging system. Blogger isn’t always reliable and I wanted something that I could have more control over. So while I think web services are going to lower the barrier to getting online for a lot of people, I don’t think they’re going to completely negate the need for people who know how to create custom solutions. The longer you’re online, the more you want to create a unique place just for you.