For quite some time now, I've been thinking about the future of GregHowley.com and my other blogs. I haven't posted at LiaHowley.com in nearly six months, due largely to concerns about how much information about my daughter I want publicly available on the internet, and I've viewed Lungfishopolis as mostly a failure for a good year now, although I continue to post there for some reason despite any kind of real following. This blog doesn't exactly have a large audience either, but the domain is my name, and I view it as my primary online presence.
It seems to me that personal blogs are waning in popularity. Facebook and Google Plus allow you to post all the same things you could on a blog, plus they give you the ability to either make things public or to share them with only specific people. It's hard to see how having a personal blog can be better than that. of course, you've got more control over your domain and your content - you won't have to worry about giving Facebook the rights to your photos or having Google sort through your content to provide you with personalized ads, but anything you post on a personal blog is one hundred percent public to everyone in the world who might like to see it.
When posting to Twitter, Facebook, Google Buzz, or Google Plus, I've often tried to take into account who might see a post before I decided where to post any given thing. Google Buzz had a good dozen or so of my (mostly New England) friends, Facebook has family and acquaintances, and Twitter has a number of cool folks I've met online but never face to face. Google Plus has all the folks from Buzz plus a number of people who have come over from Facebook. Due to its circles feature and Android integration, it's my new primary social network.
In theory, anything I wanted to post on GregHowley.com, I could post on Google Plus, and if I wanted I could make it public. And I'd probably get a heck of a lot more comments. But one thing I really like about my blog is the archive. I've got eight years and over eight hundred categorized posts here. I can go back and read about when I first heard of RSS or When we first bought our cats, I can check out the various quizzes I've written over the years or the articles I've labeled "gems", which are all hilarious. I also love to look back on things like the post I made when Lia was born or the My Little Reminder fiasco where a number of people thought I was the product's manufacturer and left me angry complaints. And if I want to find my recipe for pot pie, I google Greg Howley pot pies.
So I guess that while this site is great for archival, social networks may be better for discussion. That said, what is to become of my blog?
I think I'll keep it. At some point, I really want to redesign - so many of the sidebar items I've added over the years have been removed, and a few more of the ones that are currently there probably should be removed. I no longer feel a need to publicly share the movies I'm getting from Netflix, although it's neat that I can. I'll probably continue to have a blog and share that blog via the same RSS feed, but I may remove the full text of the last ten entires from the front page and instead just include the post names as well as my shared Google Reader items.
The big question is - when will I find time to make all these changes? Knowing me, it probably won't be sooner than six months.