Is the personal webpage dead?

In one of those terse email replies this week, Steve Jobs allegedly confirmed that iWeb will be a thing of the past once iCloud is completely rolled out. This will potentially leave thousands of creators of web pages on MobileMe scrambling to find an alternative offering.

I'm reminded of the time Apple eliminated the floppy drive when introducing the original iMac. There were howls of protest from those that thought it was impossible to practically use a computer without a floppy drive. Of course a few years later, just about every manufacturer was producing computers sans floppy.

Given the popularity of Facebook, maybe the concept of having your own webpage for photos, video, and a blog is equally outdated. Do we still see value in a page that is designed with personal flair, or is content king, and therefore we don't mind having our data presented in Facebook's drab white and blue going forward? 

Conversely, when is the last time you went to the personal homepage of someone you know? I know when I have in the last year or so, I went to their facebook page, then clicked on a link. The age of remembering URLs for personal content is disappearing: going to a friend's profile on Facebook is the way a vast majority of people connect these days.

However, there are plenty of people for whom Facebook just won't work as a MobileMe replacement. Take small business owners, for example. MobileMe enabled fast creation of slick websites. The GoDaddy's of the world offer a few templates when you register a domain, and it is doubtful that these types of sites will ever offer as robust of a web creation tool as the iWeb/MobileMe combo. 

To be clear, Apple's solution was never for everybody. In fact when we launched this site, the plan was to create it in iWeb, then host it on MobileMe (then called .mac) It was quickly apparent that even our humble site was beyond the scope of Apple's solutions. Just as iMovie allows anyone to quickly edit video though, iWeb/MobileMe allowed anyone to quickly build a basic website.

Is Apple making a mistake by eliminating a user-friendly web option, or is it merely moving a few steps ahead of everyone else, in seeing a future in which most people rely on massive social networking sites like Facebook to share their personal info? Only time will tell, but in the meantime, look for several services to crop up to help ease the transition to another service.