After the dot.com breakdown, the web changed drastically. According to O’Reilly, the web assumed a new identity from its previous form. Before the 2000s, the web was based on a product-based concept. The networks were products to be sold to the users, where users could only take contents and information as they were. Also, they had to pay for the plugins and the new updates Advertising, in the era of DoubleClick, was based on long and professional contracts between the advertising services and the client companies.
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The new internet, Web 2.0, became completely different. After its “digivolution,” the total concept changed: the network became a platform. The web wasn’t a place were users could only pay for a service through which they could take contents passively anymore. The web became a platform on which people could connect making new contents. Users became active, and through the structure of hyperlinks, they were able to empower and enhance the web itself through a net of connections and new user-generated contents. Google with its link structure, made an optimized searching engine that though a series of algorithms would optimize itself constantly influenced by the user’s usage. Advertising also twisted: now web advertisers were simple o use, and any user could advertise their content even though simple banners or popups. That happened because the market focused on the number of potential clients, rather than big single ones, focusing on the long tail of the Web, rather than the head.
Blogging changed the type of relations between people. In Web 1.0, users could read personal webpages without interacting, again, receiving passively the content. With the blogs, however, people could see a chronological link of thoughts, could share the blog posts, could comment on them starting new relationships and conversations.
This user interaction, however, changed drastically the market. The platform now needed daily upgrades and constant bug fixes, while before upgrades were made every two or three years. Now users could immediately tell what they like or what they don’t, and the big platforms know what to change to fulfill the right demand. O’Reilly calls this, “the perpetual beta”: software and platform that are continuously changing, never reaching a fixed end. This type of influence changed also the online market. On online stores such as Amazon, users can leave reviews of what they like and what they don’t, while in the past, if a product didn’t reach the user expectations, either they could not buy it, or they would have bought it taking the product as it was. On the web, with the strong impact of social media and users discussions and opinions, everything is now under their influence. For example, Sonic The Hedgehog, a movie directed by Jeff Fowler , was meant to be released in November 2019. After the first trailer, however, the internet exploded, and thousands of fan criticized very badly the design of the loved blue animal.
After this backlash, the producers decided to delay the release to May 2020 and completely redesign the main character!