Something I've been thinking a lot about recently is whether we have a say in the future of our online services because we invest so much of our time and effort in morphing them into these ultra-cool communities.

I know I harp on about it a lot, but Twitter has redefined for me what the internet is about, it's taken something that we used to see as fast and has just hit the warp-speed button, and tens of thousands of people spend large parts of the day "attached" to the site in one way or another.

It's not a question of whether we own our content, because we don't, it's a case of whether we can expect to have a say in what goes on behind-the-scenes with these sites due to the time investment. Twitter wouldn't be the same without us, or would it?

If Twitter were only a few thousand people who were spending a few hours a week generating pieces of content here and there, would the concepts of Retweeting, Follow Friday, Lists or even the API exist?
All of the former were actions that were implemented by the crowd, and they're now being added to the actual back end of the site itself, showing that how we use it is reflecting on what the site actually provides.

Because of this, are we allowed to bring into question Twitter's management, or its plan to make money? Do we feel entitled to 100% uptime, or fewer views of the Fail Whale as we're the ones who are making the site great?
Or, are we simply using a site that's going to work in much the same way whether we were there or not?

Our corner of the web is being increasingly managed by third-parties, but we're still stuck in our old view that we get to control how it is to be used, or when we can access it.

Do we own Twitter? No.

So can we question how they run their business? No, that's their look-out. We're just generating content.