If you’ve been on the web for more than ten years, there is no doubt in my mind you know about GeoCities. At one point an Internet darling costing Yahoo billions to acquire, the site faded drastically since its heyday, and today is going to shut its doors for good. The end of an era…
In the late 90’s it was THE place to go if you wanted your own website and didn’t have the know-how to build one yourself. That led to untold numbers of animated gifs, under construction signs, and other amateurish minutia that drove the rest of us nuts during this period. Because it was such a mess and smacked of such un-professionalism, whenever a GeoCities page came up in search results it was an immediate tip-off to avoid it. This undoubtedly contributed to its decline, and is also why you see such regimented user-generated sites such as MySpace and especially Facebook make it big. Even small changes to the established order of these sites can lead to massive protests.
At the end of the day this won’t mean a thing to most Internet users. Just another big website going the way of the dodo – not the first and certainly not the last. And yet, even though I never had a GeoCities site, nor regularly visited any of the millions of sites hosted there, I can’t help but give a moment of silence to something that was once such a big part of the Internet culture. This is truly history happening today.
*insert cheesy animated under-construction sign here*
Related Articles |
Steven Durham said:
GeoCities would probably still be around if it hadn’t been absorbed by that blob we call Yahoo. The staff probably would have adapted to the changing needs of Web 2.0 users, but Yahoo was too focused on $$$ and trying to play “me too” against Google and Microsoft to care. Oh well. I wonder how much the GeoCities domain is going to go for.
October 26th, 2009 at 1:05 pm
Tweets that mention Sleep Tight GeoCities : Great History -- Topsy.com said:
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Everything History, Great History. Great History said: New Article: Sleep Tight GeoCities http://bit.ly/1mTmoC [...]
October 26th, 2009 at 1:09 pm
Brian King said:
Fascinating! Someone out there decided to backup all of GeoCities, and reopen it as ReoCities. So, for any latecomers to this article who have no idea what GeoCities was, you can now see a portion of it in all its ugly-glory.
http://mashable.com/2009/10/28/reocities/
October 28th, 2009 at 2:49 pm
Brian King wrote a new blog post: Sleep Tight GeoCities Victoria University VU China said:
[...] more:Â Brian King wrote a new blog post: Sleep Tight GeoCities By admin | category: pussy tight | tags: brian-king, mind, money, more-difficult, [...]
October 30th, 2009 at 10:30 am
Steven Durham said:
Actually, Geocities lives on…in the form of Reocities. Seriously, Google ‘Reocities’ and you’ll see that someone has tried to salvage ALL of the information from the site.
November 1st, 2009 at 7:53 am