I enjoyed the article. I think the general sentiment here is that one needs to take the good with the bad.

I also think that the ongoing changes have made for a different web that is less important on the mobile devices. In watching some videos about mobile we get that people are excited about new ways of interacting with computers, perhaps with the camera, perhaps with the microphone, or perhaps with the GPS... Sometimes the web just does not feature in those trends.

The web has changed a lot since Obama first won the Presidency. His site with donations, the network effect directing traffic to his campaign site and so on... Now there are these "Streams" on mobile, I'm not sure how those could be shared with a community that was sometimes anonymous and decentralized, like you say...

Now it's like people want to drink bottled water of a certain brand instead of sharing the water in the lake (web). It doesn't seem to scale. And companies and governments are just too forceful to avoid competition and so on to allow for a thousand flowers to bloom like it may have been possible in the past.