Over the last few years the internet shaped itself into what we know as the Social internet.

The social networks such as Facebook (FB), Twitter (TWTR), Youtube (GOOGL), WordPress, Instagram, Tumbler and many more web sites gave us the power to control the content on the internet rather then just consume it. For the more consuming parts we used Spotify/Rdio/Pandora (P) for music and Netflix (NFLX), Hulu etc. for movies and TV shows. There was a defined order: You write a status on Facebook, you upload a video to Youtube, you write blog posts on WordPress or Tumblr, you watch your shows on Netflix, etc.

But in the last year or so, something has been changing in the online world that might alter the entire order of things for years to come. The Tectonic plates of the internet are shifting right before our very eyes.

I’ll start with something that looks so obvious you might not have fully understood its significance, the new Facebook search.

Facebook New Search {Screenshot – Facebook.com}

Facebook now offers a search tool not only for people, but for keywords. No more will you need to scroll through newsfeed updates from 2009 to find that post your friend posted about you. Just type in a keyword and find all posts mentioning that word.

This alone might seem like a great update to the search (and some privacy problem to some) and nothing more. But…
When you add this to Facebook’s new video function, View counts, “See more from” and the auto play in the news feed, combined with the fact that Facebook no longer lets you watch Youtube videos inline, but prompts you to a new tab, what you have is a “Youtube killer”.

Think about it: You now have a service that gives you the things Youtube does, now including a keyword search, plus Auto-play and inline feed view; why would you even want to put your child’s first words on Youtube when many more people are going to “Awwwww” at it on Facebook, and they’re relevant people too?

And on the other side of the world, Youtube is planning a revolution of its own.

More and more artists realize that music streaming services are not giving them the return they expected, artists like Taylor Swift, who recently pulled all her music catalog from Spotify, and Pharrell Williams, who was reported last week to only make $2300(!) from his 43M(!!) streams of hit song ‘Happy’ on Pandora, Youtube has now opened a beta for its Youtube Music Key service, a direct sign of war over the old music streaming world.

Youtube Music Key {Screen shot – Youtube.com}

Another front Youtube is tackling is the On-Demand official video streaming. You can now watch full featured movies on Youtube, by renting them or buying them. A good example will be the latest release of Seth Rogen’s The Interview, that was made available online in selected places, one of them Youtube, where you could stream it for $6 or buy it for $15.

So to sum it up, we have Facebook becoming a Youtube killer (after it tackled the problem of being second in the photo wars by just buying Instagram, the competition) and Youtube becoming a Spotify etc. + Netflix etc. killer.

Meanwhile, Netflix is doing the only thing it can to survive for the long run: Making great original content like Orange is the New Black, House of Cards and so on.

The only thing we know for sure is that the future of the internet as we know it is going to be different from what we used to know in the last few years.
The best news about this so-called shifting is that usually when giants go to war over the crowd, the one that benefits the most out of it is the crowd itself.

What do you think about this shifting? Can you think of another internet giant that is a part of this? Let us know in the comments.