The Internet abhors a funnel 

This might be one of those fundamental Internet laws, or it may just turn out to be a way to express another one.

The Internet is a bunch of pipes and tunnels with processors located at the junctions and at the ends of the pipes. Some of the processors are little things like iPhones, routers, blogs or webcams. Some are huge like Google's cloud.

All is good until something comes along that tries to get the whole Internet to flow through it. Compelling things that get more compelling the more stuff you flow through them. Instead of being shaped like pipes, they are shaped like funnels (as illustrated to the right).

Platforms that are owned by companies start out as funnels. They may trick you for a while into believing that they made of pipes, after all it would be suicide for the platform owner to turn the lovely ecosystem into a funnel, but companies can't help themselves. They compete internally to control resources and to the people inside the company, the platform looks like just another resource to fight over. Eventually it gets funnelized, if it wasn't from the start.

This is why my current motto about Twitter is "How I learned to stop worrying and love the Fail Whale." I can love the Fail Whale, even though as a user I hate it, because it says to me that I will soon control my own destiny in this space. That cute little whale says the idea of Twitter as a funnel (it started out as one, always has been one) is not working. As the network grows, it becomes less viable.

The funnel is also why I don't like a lot of the things Google does. Things like SideWiki that are only useful when everyone uses them. It shows funnel-oriented thinking over there. Long-term they can't make the funnel work. But as Microsoft showed us in the 90s, they can slow the rest of us down while we wait for the shakeout. Better if they never tried, imho. Better for them, for us, and esp for the Internet.