I'm going to take a punt here and suggest that the current flux in the market is to do with Web 2.0, which itself has received a real boost from social networking and search, two areas dear to IWR's heart.
There are positives and negatives to this.

Firstly, Interpretations of Web 2.0 vary, but the finest I've found comes courtesy of bash.org. I'm inadvertently straying into David Tebbut's previous post here by saying that a phenomena is not uniform, but if someone mentions Web 2.0, I tend to get suspicious. Web 2.0 is a way of neatly classifying a type of business or a practice, and it's been thoroughly hijacked, just as David argues that Quechup is likely to make people less trusting of social networking apps. This is not to say that Web 2.0 now equals evil. It doesn't, and there are a lot of fantastic applications out there that deserve to succeed.

On the positive side, it does mean that the market is warming up, there's more activity and (in theory) a greater need for titles to explain it all. At the early stages of Web 2.0, there were clear delineations between ideas and services, but as the market for social applications has heated up competition for unique features that are actually of interest to punters has got far more intensive.

What does this mean for the rest of us? I've no idea, frankly, but I do hope that a new Standard lives up to its predecessor.