It bothers me that more people don’t have personal sites. In my opinion, we all do interesting things. In order to communicate the interesting things that we do, we need to provide others with an immersive experience of our world. Personal sites of designers and artists attempt to capture our imagination with an elegantly simple and refreshing display of their portfolios or wild 3d graphics. It makes sense why this isn’t the norm, these sites take time. But people are willing to put in the time to build creative sites, as myspace and tumblr have shown. Yet, more restrictive social media sites, twitter, youtube, facebook, reign supreme.
I think there is a fine balance between sites that give you all the freedom in the world to create and sites that have some requirements. Maybe the solution is something that is more hybrid. You can have building blocks of content, a timeline of tweets, videos, etc. but the content is anything that you could dream of. Like a universal file uploader _and_ formatter. Themes would give people a starting point to express themselves, and a marketplace could emerge for people to build more visually interesting ones.
More thoughts to come on this :)