I agree with you totally, there is a cycle and walled garden social networking is the current phase and will fade into the background. Not go away mind you, bec

I agree with you totally, there is a cycle and walled garden social networking is the current phase and will fade into the background. Not go away mind you, because nothing ever really does,it just changes. I think that personal websites will surge and be augmented with social networking modules that adhere to some sort of standard. Something like encrypted RSS linking private content for your 'friends' and public content for the rest of the people. I think the popularity of social networking over the current definition of personal webpage is driven by three things, ease of use, the ability to define public/private content and cost. There are plenty of niches in such a model, pure self owned/hosted (Wordpress/Joomla/Drupal etc with plugins), advertising supported we make it easy for you (Tripod, Geocities), free(Blogger, Livejournal), subscription (pay to ditch ads), and even old guys interconnecting with the new (a fancy Facebook Connect). Benefits that I look forward to are my ability to control my interface and not have it change on someone elses whim, complete ownership of my personally generated content and an end to the serial monogamy of having to move to the new-new thing when the old-new thing inevitably dies.