This time it’s not a pattern in end-user applications, but rather in infrastructure services, which I’d call " Delivery as a Service “. In this model, new offerings provide a set of message delivery services for developers that share a few common traits:

• Digital services that pre-date the web , or were designed without the web in mind, can now be exposed as simple web services
• Legacy platforms that require extremely expensive startup costs convert into a cost-per-message (or cost per thousand messages) model
• Message systems with effective anti-spam components usually exert a high cost on spammers that can also be a prohibitively high bar for small developers unless they’re able to pool their efforts
• Service providers can aggregate requests from many small, separate applications to make costly services approachable for independent developers
• You can figure out what the hell these service providers do , unlike many generic web service providers

See also Cloudtop Applications – Anil Dash