The Internet "is not a big truck," Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens famously proclaimed last summer in a speech about network neutrality. "It's a series of tubes."

Though widely ridiculed for the metaphor, Stevens may get the last laugh: Adesso Systems on Tuesday plans to update the current beta release of its Tubes social file sharing application, software that has the potential to significantly alter the way people use and monetize the Internet.

Tubes, explains marketing VP Steve Chazin, is named and modeled on the pneumatic tube systems that used to be used by banks, among other businesses, to transport paper documents from one place to another.

The software manifestation of such systems duplicates the function of the physical version: Tubes establishes direct links between two or more computers. Adesso calls them instant personal sharing networks.

If that sounds like a glorified File Transfer Protocol application, it is and it isn't. It's as much an FTP application as Apple's iPhone is just another phone.

The genius of Tubes is that it combines file sharing, RSS-style syndication, instant messaging, and social networking, supported by an infrastructure that will soon allow one-to-one, not to mention one-to-many, file selling and advertising.

"I want to give the power to people so they can monetize the Internet rather than some aggregator," Chazin says.

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