View http://dashes.com/anil/2012/12/the-web-we-lost.html
This isn’t our web today. We’ve lost key features that we used to rely on, and worse, we’ve abandoned core values that used to be fundamental to the web world. To the credit of today’s social networks, they’ve brought in hundreds of millions of new participants to these networks, and they’ve certainly made a small number of people rich.
But they haven’t shown the web itself the respect and care it deserves, as a medium which has enabled them to succeed. And they’ve now narrowed the possibilites of the web for an entire generation of users who don’t realize how much more innovative and meaningful their experience could be.
A lot of this article resonates with me. I’ve been doing client work for a number of years now, and with each inquiry comes a direct insight into how someone I’ve (likely) never met before views the Web. I like to use it as a bit of a microscope to see how someone else perceives what their presence on the Web needs to be. Very often it’s cluttered with ideas behind social media, search engine optimization, and other distracting elements that take away from the essence of the Web. I don’t mean to sound discouraging towards such things, but I constantly question the benefit of it all. And that’s just for me personally. What the heck is any of it doing for the business world?
The Web is still super new, it’s not even a teenager yet. We’re all flailing around seeing what spaghetti sticks to the wall and to be honest: not much has yet. The landscape of the Web changes every single year. We’ve now got some pillars to study thanks to Google, Facebook, and some other select entities, but we’ve got a long way to go.