Web services are old, only few still works at a scale that requires top-notch bandwidth and throughput., such as facebook, linkedin, twitter. The new boy in town is cloud services. Only a few are dominating the market, but soon enough a lot will join the competition. However, no-matter-what we choose to dominate the internet, we do use it in such a scale that developers end up scratching the head night after night to satisfy the users.
I have been working on a extension to memcached, which I plan to build as an api, that will reduce a particular headache from the developer, by providing a fault tolerant membership aware autonomous caching service where clients can subscribe to on demand. Its still in research stage. For more information, look at my contact page for ways to get in touch with me.