[peterwwillis]

Exactly. People want to be connected, to have a kind of collection of people at their fingertips. Check what someone's been doing, send them a message. They want to share their memories and experiences. And they want the addictive qualities of Facebook... the likes, the comments, the feeds.

All of that is a social network, which is not a personal webpage.

You could create federated pages with these features using the following:

- web pages with comments and pingbacks

- wysiwyg editors

- photo albums and photo editing tools

- blogging

- direct messaging (xmpp/jabber)

Then, you could create individual social network portals that you could authorize to syndicate your federated web site. They could also host your website themselves. And each could offer unique tools, such as tools for event planning, or to help musicians promote their music (MySpace, anyone?). But the idea would hinge on multiple of these popping up at the same time, owned by different start-ups, which could be tricky.