Death of the Personal Homepage
Posted by Nick O'Neill on June 18th, 2008 9:30 AMAs far back as I can remember, it has been a “cool” thing to have your own personal homepage. A site where anybody can drop by and get to know a little more about you. At one point having your own personal website was a unique thing but eventually the novelty wore off. While it’s still important to have a place where people can go to learn about you, filling your site with “widgets” and other random trinkets is more about self expression instead of providing valuable insight into your personality.
Fred Wilson thinks that “we need to move to a model where the content is all in the same flow.” He uses Tumblr as an example but the first thing that popped into my head was FriendFeed. The reality is that most peoples’ blogs and personal websites are only interesting to their family and close friends and that’s the extent of it.
Recently though, sites like Facebook have made it easier to connect and keep people up to date without the thoughts expressed through a personal journal. Snippets of our thought processes pop-up on our friends’ home pages thanks to status updates. That’s ultimately all we want to know when it comes to written content from most of our connections. For instance, most of my friends don’t read any of my blogs even though I have thousands of blog posts.
They simply want to see the pictures of things I’ve been up to and information about my recent activities. It’s the voyeur in all of us but most of us will never go so far as to reading every single article that our friends’ have written. I believe that self expression is important but I’m not so sure that it needs to come in the form of an incredible looking website. We can share our creativity through images whether they are photographs or paintings.
We can also express our creativity through the music we create, listen to and share. Personal web pages have been about creativity and self expression but they haven’t been as focused on connecting and ultimately connecting is the most powerful component of the internet. While widgets enable creativity and personal expression I think that there are already plenty of tools that enable creative expression. It’s more about connecting that expression through a continuous stream of content.
As such, I think the average person no longer needs a “personal homepage” which exists on a separate domain. If you are really in need of a domain name, throw a CNAME on it and have it display your FriendFeed. While this is somewhat of a tangent from Fred Wilson’s suggestion that we need to move past widgets, I think it means the same thing.
Ultimately we are moving beyond the standard personal homepage and moving toward streams of our digital identity. Do you think there is still a need for a “personal homepage”?
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Far from it, what is more important is using your personal homepage as the owner of your web-wide identity. For example, my single authoritative FOAF file could be just at amitkoth.com, with other FOAF publishers being a subset of my master.
In a new age where identity is also centralised e.g. OpenID, it is also very useful to have a personal homepage to actually run your identity, if you're techie enough to do that.
In addition, a personal homepage essentially uses "live widgets" to still achieve the same purpose - tell people about yourself. While before you pasted in picture galleries our your site, you can now pop in a light FlickR widget to show your photos. In fact, if you think about it, the smart services should be attacking how to widgetise an old style personal homepage. Your professional background could easily pull in your LinkedIn profile in a widget as a replacement, and so on.
The secret sauce to a killer service for public use is to see - what used to be on personal homepages? How can each bit be widgetised? Usually, it takes the form of a rich content system, like FlickR replacing the need to have your own photo gallery.
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Being in academia, I know that a lot of people in my profession still maintain personal homepages with their CVs, their class information, etc. They use those pages as a form of validation, as if to say, "You can trust the journal articles I have published because look at everything else I have done." For us, it's essential to maintain an air of legitimacy.
That said, I completely agree that SNSs have replaced the personal homepages of a decade ago. They are much easier to create and maintain, and they are linked directly to all of that person's "friends'" pages. I mean, how much simpler can you get than the Facebook interface?
Finally, kids today are still being very creative via the Internet, just not necessarily through personal homepages. In the Pew Internet Project's "Teens and Social Media" report from Dec. 2007, they reported the following stats regarding teens' (12-17 year-olds) use of social media:
* 39% of online teens share their own artistic creations online, such as artwork, photos, stories, or videos, up from 33% in 2004.
* 33% create or work on webpages or blogs for others, including those for groups they belong to, friends, or school assignments, basically unchanged from 2004 (32%).
* 28% have created their own online journal or blog, up from 19% in 2004.
* 27% maintain their own personal webpage, up from 22% in 2004.
* 26% remix content they find online into their own creations, up from 19% in 2004.
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~V
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The page, however, is nothing but a hub: simply links to the sites that I've created or use regularly (http://absono.us). I've seen a number of others take a similar approach, as well; so much of our activity online is tied to specific sites that pointers make more sense than a ca. 1999 home page.
My resume? On LinkedIn, no point in retyping it. Cool links I've found? All on del.icio.us already. You want to know what music I like and listen to? The Hype Machine already keeps track of that for me, why would I maintain another list?
The Web offers us far better tools to capture the different aspects of ourselves now, making links and pointers a much simpler, low-friction approach to offering an online presence.
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