The Death of Personal Webpages?

With all of the recent online upstarts like Myspace and Facebook, do personal websites even have a chance of maintaining readership? I find it difficult to garner readership to this site when it’s “easier” for the reader to just have a Myspace or Facebook account. For the average person, logging into one website that tells you all of the activities of your friends is probably preferable to manually checking each individual’s website.

Case in point: Facebook’s new “News Feed” addition. Basically, it shows you everything that your “friends” (I use that term loosely with these type of sites) have done in the last week or so. If Jill has commented on Bob’s page, then it shows that. Or if Tom posts a picture, it shows that. It’s very simple to stalk someone; not that I would know, I’m just saying. Features like this compliment the American work ethic of “easier is better.”

For pages like this, though, that rest solely on dedicated readers who take the time to involve themselves, it may be hard to attain repeated hits or new hits at all. Of course, there are no hard stats on this, only my personal, skewed speculation, but in a logical sense I think that people would agree. I know that I have a small base of repeat readers on this site, and that’s fine, but linking this page on, say, Facebook has limited to no value. Since I’ve let GoDaddy host my site, their stats have shown that in the last two months (since switching) only 21 people have come here from Facebook. This isn’t a fault of anyone, but it kind of shows that 1.) no one clicks on those links at Facebook and once people are on that site they never leave, like it’s a self contained universe, or 2.) that no one really gives a crap about me personally, which is more likely the case.

Since no one leaves the Myspaces or Facebooks to venture into uncharted webspace, it would seem like they are just taking over with their cookie cutter pages that people pretend are unique because they put up a new background. It’s either that, or I’m just a little bitter that no one really gives a crap about anything but these sites. I’ll admit that I participate on Facebook to an extent, posting pictures and things, but on the whole where I write is here.

I’m going to end my rant here, like I usually do, with no conclusion, but I’m going to ask everyone out there who actively reads this site to post a comment. I’m curious to see who has stuck around.