First off, welcome back.

One thing you missed while in there, the thing that drove and still drives these changes is ‘advertising’. Advertising is quite literally the key to each and every one of these things, the ones that figured it out are still around, the ones that didn’t are gone. Advertising is changed now from the model it had to having this idea of ‘reach’ (the company ‘Klout’ is an example of this). Facebook provides it in likes and shares, twitter in reposts and favs and so on. Advertising has changed the news sites, so you have ‘native’ advertising, which means you cannot trust nearly any ‘magazine’ or ‘news’ site online because you will be reading an article and suddenly realize you are reading an extended advertisment. Basically, we are in a small dark-ages of the web because everyone is trying to make money so hard that all the people who just want to connect with friends have to increasingly isolate themselves or be bombarded with weight loss supplement ads. Email is ‘gmail’ now, it evenmakes the news when it goes out. The reason is, almost no single company can now keep up with spam and it is way cheaper to swap to google apps for business than to hire someone to dedicate themselves to fighting spam.