This is slightly off-topic, but since everybody's commenting about it anyway: Was Google Reader (and Posterous, to a lesser extent) the tipping point for awareness and activism surrounding the shutdown of free services? This could be a big thing in 2013.
The tipping point for me was Twitter's increasingly hostile approach to third party devs.
I've been racking my brain trying to think of the first service that I used regularly that was shut down. Pownce maybe? (anyone else remember that?).
I'm currently hunting for a replacement for Gmail that is self-hosted, or at least a solution where the cost of switching providers is low (i.e. I could shift my email to a new host without changing my email address or losing my message history). I'll probably end up using some sort of IMAP provider. There are a lot of features I'd stand to lose though. Conversation view is hugely useful, and Gmail's spam filter is just unbeatable.
both twitter and in some part google have recently acted very hostile to the notion of the open web. (Although referring to corporations as a singular entity irks me somewhat)
