Steve Rubel is an interesting guy to follow. He has his finger on the pulse of technology and his insights into online trends are often very thought-provoking. One of the trends he has been following is the decline of personal blogs in favor of newer “life-streaming” services such as Twitter, Tumblr, FriendFeed, Posterous, Facebook and others. His recent post about a blogger who shifted over to FriendFeed got me thinking about the way that I have largely abandoned my blog in favor of Twiiter and Facebook. Part of my comment on his post:

I noticed that after I started using Facebook a lot ( I was a very late adopter ) I also stopped posting to my blog very much. But my online interaction with other people increased. More people actually read what I say on Facebook than on my blog. This has led me to wonder if Blogger is a dying platform… and I think it is.

I think the notion of the top-level domain itself is becoming somewhat less relevant. My online identity is scattered across the Web, not just concentrated in my vanity domain. WWW.mydomain.com just really doesn’t encompass my Web identity any more. Perhaps we need something more identity-centered and dynamic than a top-level domain.

There are several components to this trend. Simplicity is a big one. Maintaining your own top-level domain blog is a lot of work. This blog is currently hosted on Blogger, and Blogger is not very user-friendly. I usually have to clean up my posts by manually inserting HTML tags where Blogger has messed up the formatting. It’s a hassle, and it interferes with the process of just communicating my thoughts. You can do a lot of cool things with Blogger, things you could never do with Twitter or Facebook, but you have to work at it.

Interactivity is another component. Sure, I want to communicate whatever it is that I have to say… but I also want interaction and discussion with readers. Twitter and Facebook make that easy. With Blogger, you have to work at it. You have to build your PageRank up enough to pull in the readers. You have to convince readers to make the effort to fill out a comment form. With Facebook, Twitter and similar services, you really don’t have to pull so hard. The readers are already there, already registered to comment. Moreover, it’s not just a one-way flow. With Facebook and Twitter I can see and comment on things that other people are saying even if they are unrelated to my status updates. Much more interactive.

Identity is the component which is rapidly developing into the single most important trend on the Web. It seems to me that Facebook and Twitter have done the best job so far of projecting an online identity across the Web. OpenID is another, non-proprietary competitor. In theory I prefer OpenID but in my experience it just doesn’t work well in implementation. I have stopped using OpenID because it was causing me more hassle than convenience. Facebook Connect and Twitter just work without a lot of hassle.

Disqus is another approach to online identity. It centralizes your comments from across the Web into one account, and it also interfaces with OpenID, Facebook and Twitter. I really like the way Disqus pulls your comment threads together into one place. You can set it up to email notify you of comments, and you can then reply by email as well. It’s a convenient way to conduct an online discussion.

I think the future of the Web will emphasize identity more than the top-level domain. The domain will of course continue to be important, but the identity will assume the position of primary importance. The identity will be like a thread tying together your presence across the Web. The identity might be seen in the manner of the internet-connected smart phone: it’s a node on the Web but its address is dynamic. Perhaps the smart phone is the beginning of the physical incarnation of the online identity.