I was writing an email to a friend earlier who asked me where they could find services that provide free personal web sites. He’s researching for a book he’s writing. Well if you’ve been on the internet long enough you would remember one of the best services out there was GeoCities. It’s still around, it’s just now owned and operated by Yahoo.

GeoCities was really cool.  The old version of it.  You could sign up for a space, almost like looking for a house to live in.  And you would select the area in GeoCities that you wanted your site to reside, usually in a themed area.  Kind of like a master planned community… some are designed for families with kids, some for people who either don’t have children or are empty nesters, and of course the retirement areas.

It was free, and they did have ads that showed up on your web site, but it wasn’t that bad… because you didn’t have to pay for it!

It was also one of the first real online communities, not just free web sites.. clusters of web sites that had common interests or themes.

These days you can go to places like http://theweboutfitter.com register and pay for a domain name (usually less than $12 a year) and get a free web site to boot, plus other things like email.  The free add ons are ad supported, but it’s great if you want to just get a site on the web without too much investment, or want some content on the web before your web designer (maybe meaning yourself) gets that rocking super web site created!

I told my friend that I thought that free personal web sites are on their way out.  My reasoning for this is that you can get the same functionality from a number of free services that are out on the internet today… and you don’t have to know how to use HTML, or FTP or really any of that complicated web creation/maintenance stuff.

For example, take myspace.  You can sign up on myspace and set up what is essentially a personal web site… some of the services out there call them profiles, like facebook.  There are various types of social services you can tune into, facebook and myspace are really more on the personal side, where linkedin.. well that’s focused on professional and business networking. 

All of these services allow you to upload pictures, post things about yourself, invite people to become friends so you can read each others information… trade stuff… and so on.  In a way it’s actually a bit better than the old GeoCities because you can to a certain extent control who has access to see your pictures of the family reunion and so on.

And you don’t need to know a lot about computers to get a presence on the web with these services. 

Blogging, that’s the other new and great way to have a ‘personal web site’. Most bloggers have blogs on services like wordpress.com or blogger.com to name a couple.  Others like myself have their own domain and hosting and installed the blogging software themselves (I like to live on the edge..)

So, with all these free services that pretty much give you a profile to load up with things about you, why get into designing a personal web site?  One of the things you can give up is the right to control your content on these free services… what I mean by that is the company providing the service may have the right to re-publish what you post, be it a poem, story or pictures wherever they wish, or create derivative works from them.  But that’s the price of free isn’t it? You also get bombarded with advertising as well, but hey, isn’t that happening in your regular life too?  Billboards, radio, TV and t-shirts scream out to you to buy products, or at least keep some company top of mind; in case you need that power saw or ice cream maker.

There is also the spector of the free service going paid, meaning you’re hooked, you want more, so you start paying for it.  Or so much worse than that, they cease to exist, along with all your information… gone; poof! 

So, I think the personal web sites are on their way out, replaced by social network profiles and blogs…  Certainly easier to maintain those than your own site.