Bye Bye Blog

I’ve had my own personal website since 1994, back when the URL was earthlink.net/~jaswood. For the last 5 years, I’ve had some sort of blog. I’ve been using Tumblr (which I like a lot) for the last several months as a way to share random things, but have found it difficult to manage how it should go to Twitter and Facebook, as that’s where my (meager) audience really is.

So, I’ve decided to make Facebook my main website. The privacy controls are granular enough that I can hide things I don’t want the general public to see (i.e. Halloween 1993), but it can house all the things that I would do here - share links, post pictures, add random thoughts. I am also closing down the random TypePad & WordPress sites I had accumulated over the years and concentrate my efforts on Facebook & Twitter.

Now, you may rightfully say, “Who cares?” but it does actually bring up a greater point - that personal blogs and websites are being overtaken by Facebook & Twitter. I had a site for years that no one went to, but I can get hundreds of people in a given day see something that I do on these social sites. Now, some people with real content abilities/interests are still going to have Tumblr and other personal blogging sites to use, but I think the explosive growth of blogs will slow down. Why maintain a site that no one goes to when you can share the same things with actual friends on these networks?

So, I will be shutting this site down in the next week or so, redirecting jasonwoodmansee.com to my Facebook profile, and going on a friending binge. This decision makes it logical to expand my definition of “friend” to more how I approach Twitter - after all, I can always not share things with people I don’t know super well, and I can hide them from my timeline also. I may miss not having a site I call my own, but I think that will be fleeting.

See you on Facebook and Twitter…