The Web has connected us for years with many people and different companies, and it’s not weird to see this medium evolve into what it is now. The Web has become an essential part of the modern life and it has even become a way of socializing with others with pages like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Whatsapp, Snapchat, and many other social networks. Knowing that people use this media to communicate with other people or by accessing knowledge from many database, does it mean that it’s being used correctly? Does it mean that the administrators of many web pages use it correctly? These are some of the questions that the article The Web We Lost answers, and also shows us how the Web was used when it began. The article begins talking about the social media that was and still is Flickr which is a social page for sharing pictures. The difference about Flickr and Instagram which is another media for sharing pictures is that Flickr gives you a better resolution, gives you more memory space for big sized pictures, and it lets you share it with the world with Creative Commons right. These things make Flickr a bit more friendly to the user and letting them share with other users around the world freely something that Instagram doesn’t do with the same freedom. Twitter is a social media that connects us with our friends and lets the people connect with many different companies, artists, authors, and any other person or company you’re interested in. While using Twitter you can search for a word that brings you interest in a form of a hashtag. The hashtag turns a word into a link and it lets you see who are talking about whatever it is you wrote something like what the Technorati did once, but it was a very slow system. Technorati was used a decade ago, but it failed to keep up with the times and the great amount of blogging that people were doing so it failed and was forgotten. The article talks about links and this is what it says. “Ten years ago, you could allow people to post links on your site, or to show a list of links which were driving inbound traffic to your site. Because Google hadn’t yet broadly introduced AdWords and AdSense, links weren’t about generating revenue, they were just a tool for expression or editorializing. The web was an interesting and different place before links got monetized, but by 2007 it was clear that Google had changed the web forever, and for the worse, by corrupting links.” – Anil Dash What this means is that people used the Web to share information they wants to, but since now everything is about making money or getting more followers things have changed and people post to gain these things. As we can see in this article the Web has surely changed in some things for the better, but in other for the worse. Anil Dash’s article states that when the Web began it’s purpose was for people to search for information and do whatever they wanted to socialize and have fun with it, but now it’s become a business of big companies fighting for your money. Companies like Facebook, Microsoft, and Google have control of some parts of the Web, and they use it to gain more money leaving out invention and creativity to do big things with the Web. When the article refers to “The web we lost” these are the things it talks about companies are using it to make a chosen few richer and the users can’t take full advantage of what the Web has to offer. An interesting article showing us the lack of control we have over the internet, but how companies use it to make themselves richer is called “The Internet is Fucked Up” by Nilay Patel I insist you give it a look and see what is really happening to the Web. Now, I can truly say that we’ve lost a very important part of the Web which is freedom and creativity.
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