• Los Angeles Times, Wednesday, March 25, 2009 11:15 AM

Last year, TWiT.tv founder Leo Laporte quit Twitter. Soon, he found that "walking away from a megaphone that big" just wasn't good business, so he begrudgingly returned. "They kind of have you," Laporte tells the Los Angeles Times' David Sarno. "The same way that Facebook has you: because you have to go where the community is."

Sarno argues that Twitter, which grew more than 1300% last year, has essentially become its own medium, "taking its place alongside Web pages, e-mail and maybe even television." And while the company may not exactly be Fortune 500 size, "one company shouldn't have a monopoly on an entire medium -- even if it invented it," he says.

Laporte and others agree. "Those of us who are participating are pumping value into this closed system and trusting that Twitter will do the right thing with it...but what they ignore is that there's a dark side to all of that, which is that these companies have a huge amount of control over what's going on." Adds Dave Winer, a Web entrepreneur: "It's a very dangerous network because it's all centralized," he said, "not only on a technological level, where it goes through one set of servers -- but it also goes through one set of business interests that's anything but transparent."

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