The Cask of Amontillado

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d4/CaskofAmontillado-Clarke.jpg/220px-CaskofAmontillado-Clarke.jpg  The Cask of Amontillado  is an 1846 short story written by Edgar Allan Poe in which a character is chained to a wall and walled up, analogous to many silo practices.

In the story, one of the characters is, while inebriated, chained to a wall and bricked up alive.

The story can be used as an analogy to many silos, which are often open and welcoming at various points in their existence. But once they generate a user base, they often start to wall up their users inside.

Examples include:
 * Twitter and its decision to discourage the third-party applications that initially brought many users into the platform
 * Google and Facebook discontinuing XMPP support, etc.