It’s hard to find good help these days and when you do it’s even more painful to loose that help. Last week Values of n [valuesofn.com] announced that it’s taking their online services I Want Sandy [iwantsandy.com] and Stikkit [stikkit.com] offline for good. Sandy was like your insanely anal-in-a-good-way, super-oraganized personal assistant, while Stikkit was akin to a band of intelligent robotic sticky notes. But as of December 19, 2008 users will find themselves deep in the chaotic mess of everyday life wondering where their favorite assistants went.

“Why?” you ask. It seems the brainchild behind the services and CEO of Values of n, Rael Dornfest, is taking a job at Twitter.com and bringing Sandy and Stikkit with him. But don’t celebrate yet, according to a blog post by Dornfest, “Twitter has no immediate plans to incorporate Sandy or Stikkit’s feature sets into its core product.”

In a similar story last week Pownce [pownce.com] also announced the December 15th shut down of its social networking site for rather similar reasons. The creators of Pownce have taken positions at Six Apart [sixapart.com], makers of blogging software Movable Type and Vox, and they’re taking their toys with them. Again it seems there are no plans to port the Pownce service to Six Apart, but users are encouraged to export the contents of their accounts so they can “continue the spirit of Pownce on Vox or TypePad,” according to a post on the Six Apart blog.

“What does it all mean?” Well let me tell you; I have no clue. But I have wondered how long sites like this would be able to survive with no (or weak) revenue models, and heavy competition for users’ affection from similar services on the Web. My prediction is that this is a trend we will continue to witness in the future.

Now if I could only build that time machine I’ve been meaning to get around to. I’d place a few wagers on which Web 2.0 giants will be standing and who gets gobbled up by this time next year.