April 29, 2008
The End of the Personal Homepage
In The vanishing personal site Jeffery Zeldman writes about the replacement of the personal home page with 3rd party content hosting providers such as Flickr, MySpace, and Twitter.
I have a Twitter account that I never use. I don't have a MySpace or LinkedIn account. I haven't found the need for one. I have my personal web site. Although that site has occasionally moved from one host (and domain) to another and also has had multiple content reorganizations, it has been the central point of my online presence for over 10 years. And, although it may someday soon become passé I intend to keep it that way and only supplement the personal site with the services provided by others.
The issue that I currently see with relying completely on third parties for your content management (and I use this term loosely) is that you have very little control over the presentation and management of that content. The URL scheme, for one example, may be changed by the third party and break any of your existing links. At least if I host my own content when the links change it's my own fault and I most likely had an alternative to avoid the problem.
At some point people will be sick of MySpace and the personal home page will become fashonable once again. I intend on riding out the storm and wait to become one of the "old timers" when that day comes.
