The Death of the Personal Site

Take note, my friends, for the World Wide Web is in the midst of a revolution. We are witnessing the death of the beloved “personal site.” Once a place for an individual to include all sorts of first-person content, like favorite movies and books, travel journals, photographs, professional information, links, etc, is quickly being replaced by such sites as Twitter, Flickr, Del.icio.us and Vimeo.

No longer does one need to have one web-site to house and present all their information. Now, we can post our photos on Flickr, our favorite links of Del.icio.us, our videos of Vimeo, out status on Twitter. Heck, we can even put our mix tapes on Muxtape! Todd Dominey recently stopped blogging altogether in favor of Twitter saying “writing pithy thoughts on a personal blog is a luxury I can no longer afford.” This is the sort of thing the web is seeing more and more of. Over the last few months, I’ve seen multiple people wave farewell to blogging, using Twitter as their primary outlet for posting quick thoughts.

Jeffrey Zeldman, often credited with starting the first personal site has also contributed to the topic writing on his blog that the new personal sites will simply be a home base linking to your various outlets spread across the web. He says: “It could almost be the freshened-up splash page of a late 1990s personal site, except that the navigation, instead of pointing inward to a contact page, resume, blog, link list, and photos, points outward to external web services containing those same things.” He goes on to write about how these services can be integrated so a web professional no longer needs to create everything themselves.

I would argue that over the next few years (months?) we will see less and less “personal blogs” as people begin to switch to these new services, whether that be a service like Twitter or something new that has yet to be released. Perhaps, in the coming months, the only people who will blog are the ones that really love blogging and what to keep blogging. Moreover, I agree with Zeldman, in that the personal site will transition to a single page providing links to our various endeavors. Ultimately, I believe, the personal site as we know it, will die off.

Currently, I’m in the midst of a redesign of my site. It’s always been a mix of a professional design portfolio and a personal site like I mentioned above. However, I noticed this new design leans heavily on the portfolio side with much less features regarding the personal side of things. Why? Because I no longer need these things on my site when they can be found elsewhere on the web. I’m contributing to the death of the personal site.

Zeldman closes his article with “If your goal in creating a personal site way back when was to establish an online presence, meet other people who create websites, have fun chatting with virtual friends, and maybe get a better job, well, you don’t need a deep personal site to achieve those goals any more.” And while he absolutely right, I still hold a deep fondness for the personal site and choose to keep mine. Plus, I still love blogging.