However much I may disagree with the concept of them, social or profile-sharing network sites have made personal web pages obsolete and redundant. I would have preferred that the web itself, not services that ride on the web, become the platform by which individuals share media and stay in touch (not to mention, allow people to maintain rights and control over their own content). Had social networking evolved on the straight web, there'd be no need for everyone to be on the same service today in order to acquire its social networking benefits. The ultimate irony is that there is increasing chatter about opening social networks up to one and other, so that, effectively, the social web will wind up simply being re-built over the common HTTP protocol. The only difference is that the social shell component that results will have advertisers and businesses acting as intermediates that will continue to cull valuable information about you. Go figure.
To their credit, social networking sites, in exchange for data about users of course, do effectively eliminate the need for knowing how to program HTML. They also offer a common framework for sharing information that is perhaps more seamless than anything that could be done on today's web directly.
