WTF - Couchsurfing takes a dive

Techcruch has reported that Couchsurfing has taken a dive. The site is down and most likely has closed it's doors for good. Being a user of couchsurfing, I am saddened to see this happen. It seems there was a series of mistakes made by the administrators of the database and now the data is gone. I really though Couchsurfing was a great site and great community of nearly 100,000 users. I used it when I travelled to europe to meet locals and get travel advice. Techcrunch has a deadpool list of startups that have failed, but this brings to home a bigger issue that we must consider. Who do you trust with your data, and who will be around to make sure it lasts?

Flickr is one service that can go by the way of couchsurfing and impact thousands of users, and there are examples of popular services like this where consumer investment is low (read free) and company funding is nonexistent. (yes Flickr is now owned by Yahoo, so it is here for now)

I just don't know what to say.......I know there will be a new site that will take it's place, but it is a sad day in the "social networking" world.

Update: For those who have not seen the service, the wayback machine has a copy of the site as of 2005 here

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