We finally have something to be excited about during these dark days of the current economy. Back in the dark ages of the internet, when most people still had to “dial in” while listening to some strange device making weird sounds in order to go on the net, there were services that allowed people with absolutely no knowledge on web design to create and host webpages. One of those services was GeoCities.
Everybody who has been on the internet long enough remembers the heydays of services like GeoCities, Angelfire, and Tripod. Endless barrages of animated .gifs, banner tags, fixed backgrounds with scrolling text, frames with scrollbars, suicide-inducing fonts… Those were dark times, my friends, and if you don’t recall them, or never experienced them, I envy you.
The last few years you really had to look very hard to find websites like that. Still, every now and then, Google would dredge up a GeoCities website, and if you were to casually click on the link without thinking, you’d be blind for three days.
GeoCities started out as Beverly Hills Internet, founded by David Bohnett and John Rezner in the winter of 1995. They wanted to create a virtual community, full of virtual cities that corresponded to real-world locations; technology sites were hosted in “SiliconValley”, entertainment ones in “Hollywood”, and so on. GeoCities was later purchased by Yahoo!, and ever since, it has been slowly declining, withering away into irrelevance.
Yahoo! has finally pulled the plug on GeoCities. Well, it will pull the plug officially later this year, but it already no longer accepts new sign-ups. Yahoo! states that people can still “enjoy” (that’s just cruel) their sites today, but that it will all be gone later this year.
Obituaries in the comments, please.
My first website was on Geocities.
http://geocities.com/vienna/studio/4004
I remember it like it was yesterday…
My first site URL still works, despite no one other than me remember it: http://www.geocities.com/pentagon/bunker/5665/
We will miss Geocities, more for the nostalgia than actual usefulness.
I had a couple of geocities sites myself. The most successful one is still up:
http://www.geocities.com/sonic2000gr
I remember buying my first digital camera to take all the photos for this. I spent a summer designing it in (and trying to learn) Dreamweaver. I don’t update this anymore, but it is also up at an alternate location.
Personally, I enjoyed the web a lot more back when sites were like that… It was a lot of fun to explore a person’s cohesive experiences about a topic in everyday life that they were enthusiastic about — not just scattered pre-processed updates & form entries. Exchanging email (if there was enough in common) often meant being entertained by more of their tales, plus the joy of getting to excitedly share some with them.
I preferred the BBC News article, it has a quote from ZDNet editor Rupert Goodwins.
I don’t see any fundamental change here in web 2.0. How is Twitter going to fund itself? How are any of these services going to float, if nothing is certain anymore.
$3.6bn!? You can only laugh at how grossly overvalued Geocities was. $3.6bn for a bunch of worthless page from people with no particular web development skill. And when the fickle crowds move on to the next thing, where’s that value then? I see MySpace, Facebook even being just as laughable in 10 years time, when we’ve all moved onto the next more cooler, better thing.
Yes.
That’s the whole deal with Web 2.0.
1. Create cheap web site
2. Build up a community
3. get some impressive numbers like usage stats, member amount, etc.
4. ????
5. PROFIT == get yourself sold for fantasy prizes while you can
And like the 2.0 says — it’s actually history repeating. Second internet hype after new market crash. But this times its not the stock market, but the big players who buy.
Edited 2009-04-24 15:48 UTC
No huge spike in NASDAQ this time though. 🙂
http://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&chvs=max…
I could not agree more, this has been my sentiments exactly. People just catch on to what ever the latest fad is. Now ALL we here is twitter this and twitter that. Personally I find blogging, even the name, just completely idiotic. It has come to a point where every moron has a soapbox, yet not everyone really has anything important or interesting to say. Worse is the attention give these bloggers as if they are “journalists”. Well, most journalists are professionals, who have ethical codes (well not all), who most importantly rely on sources. For bloggers it’s “huh, who needs sources”.
I know things have gone down hill when my newspaper now devotes a whole page in the editorial section to the bloggers. Uggh.
Eh, science news is what I really care about. And at the moment even so-so science bloggers are better than the top science reporters at the major papers.
Think on the history of printing and journalism – we call high-falutin’ newspapers broadsheets, and these evolved from the ballad-filled broadsides that appeared in late mediaeval and early modern times.
Broadsides were soapboxes, and more akin then to what blogging is now than they are to what they gave birth oo- so called ‘expert’ journalists, who, as anyone will tell you who has ever had a brush with them, distort even the plainest and most mundane facts (and this has happened to me).
Take the case of Minerva in South Korea now – the blog which has made uncannily accurate predictions of that country’s economy, so much so that the authorities wanted to shut it down: the same spirit that informs Facebook et al informs that type of free and direct expression to the populace.
Or would you rather we were still ignorant, depending on a priestly caste communicating their ‘higher’ thoughts in a dead language, as was the case before Gutenberg published his vernacular Bible? You are blogging yourself in a way here, and I expect that you have therefore a reasonably high opinion of yourself and your views – why deny the right to publish to others? After all, they are just as fallible, or infallible, as you.
“Back in the dark ages of the internet, when most people still had to “dial in” while listening to some strange device making weird sounds in order to go on the net, there were services that allowed people with absolutely no knowledge on web design to create and host webpages. One of those services was GeoCities.”
Have you never went to Myspace? Its just as bad/worse than geocites. An unsuspecting visitor going to see their friends Myspace profile will surely get their face meletd off when the page loads, and their web browser will run just like it was back in 1995 due to all the crap people put on their page as well so, imo, they are just about the same.
So if sites like Geocites were the dark ages of the interweb, what does that make Myspace, the apocalypse?
MySpace sucks so much, yet it is so popular…It’s for the average guy who loves everything messed, ugly and blinking all over the place.
AGREE!!! Those social networking sites are horrible. Made by people with too much bandwidth and time on their hands.
Die animated GIF. DIE
If you think animated GIFs are bad, animated PNGs are 2x as awesome. You can upload them in so many places that don’t expect it
hehe, I remember Andrew saying “what have I done!”(or something along those lines) after finishing his work on apng.
..absolutely, yes it does..
Seriously, WTF?
It’s a ‘long-item’ (Read-more); ergo – page 1. Page 2 items have no ‘Read more’. That’s the line that defines the too, not appropriateness.
Unfortunately it was lost long ago (was in soho/lofts, can’t remember the number), but it was nice to play around with. The Angelfire advanced mode is what got me into web programming (who knew it was raw HTML?! or that you couldn’t put it back..LOL).
And instead of Geocities and Angelfire we now have even worse monstrosities like MySpace and it’s ilk. It really makes me wish for the relative bliss of animated gifs and scrolling text.
Perhaps those were dark times but if that’s the case we’re in pitch black darkness now.
Good riddens!
And Myspace/Facebook/the rest of those things can die horribly, too.
Why the hell are you comparing geocities to myspace?
I used geocities back in 1997 – the core selling point is to make a ‘web site’ easily. I couldn’t care less about uploading pictures of myself at a party or tell my visitors who my friends are.
Now I know myspace web page layout is a big thing (able to customize the look and appearance of your profile) – BUT they are in the content business. They expect you to fill the content in (your age, photo, status, etc.).
Geocities on the contrary, is essentially a low level web site hosting company. Too many competition in good quality hosting at low prices with more features (php, perl mods, etc.)
I think most realize that the two (Geocities and MySpace) are different from a technological point of view. But what is comparable is that many (a majority?) of sites on both services are cringe-inducing from a visual design standpoint.
Of course, the “members.aol.com” sites probably trump both of them for the largest number of “internet eyesores.”
ah, geocities. Social networking at it’s finest.
It surprises me that the current crazy in social networking is all about websites that are more restricted in what you can do. Why do people trade webhosting for something worse than web hosting and email for something worse than email?
I used to have a geocities site, I’d link to my friend’s sites(even if they didn’t use geocities) and they’d link to mine. I’d email my friends and they’d email me back(even if they didn’t use geocities).
– Jesse McNelis
My work at $Dayjob deals with spams and malware.
The amount of abuse that goes on with Geocities is astonishing. My guess is that 98%+ of new Geocities accounts in recent years are just landing sites for porn, and med spams.
A certain part of me is sad to see the Internet icon go, but the anti-spammer in me is glad to see this spam haven go.
I’ll miss that site. I’ll miss having my own free webpage, Annabella’s html help, to jazz it up. Embedding and tiling your entuire background with Flaming Animated GIFs of your name, bringing your PC to a crawl. AAAAAAAAAHHHHH the memories!
But those were definitely fun times.
RIP Geocities!!!
Old memories of tripod.com. I
I don’t know why this news item sounds like a good news…
…history should never be erased and forgotten…
sad day.
Maybe in the sense of “those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.”
Although Bud Uglly Designs is still around – and it’s a fairly accurate distillation of most Geocities sites.
I wondered what that gurgling sound was – please remember to put the seat down!
The evolution of the internet. And the younger generation definitely has an effect on the next FAD of hosted service. Back in my day, and I’m sure others can go further back, Just being able to send an email through Compuserve BBS or Sierra Online had the Biggest WOW factor. And no doubt the time of Geocities created a HUGE buzz of having your own free space on the internet no matter how crappy it was by today’s standards and even the standards of those days itself. Today it’s still the theme of having your own “Space” on the internet. A typical re spin of the days of old But with new wrapping, customizations, and a new name.
Is yahoo going to remove all of the broken links as well?
80% the geocities links out there are broken anyway. My question is, will anyone even notice geocities is gone?
Edited 2009-04-25 02:36 UTC
I thought Geocities predated 1995? I’m pretty sure I had a Geocities account late 1994 / early ’95.
Back then, the ‘Homestead’ brand wasn’t in use, but it was still Geocities and it was still a whole 5MB of free web space.
Personally, I never liked Geocities and jumped ship the moment a better free hosting service turned up (like the free-loading student I was back then)
For a while I used to have my home site in Xoop which has then bought by Yahoo and merged into Geocities.
Forgot the link though.
Oh, I am really getting old!
… as millions of animated “under construction” gifs were just taken down from the web.
Now all we need is for someone to pull the plug on Yahoo!
“Yahoo finally pulls the plug on Geocities”
.. and people are rejoicing? This is like hearing the Smithsonian is finally pulling the plug on the National Museum of American History, or the British Museum is finally pulling the plug on Ancient Egyptian Life and Death room.
Geocities is part of the web’s (terrible) past. I’m a little sad to see it go. I mean, honestly, I never go there but still. Hopefully the Internet Archive does a good sweep of the place before it disappears.
Full disclosure: [url=http://geocities.com/mamiya0taru/]my first page[/url] was (and sitll is, for now) also on geocities. Horrible yes, but I’ll have to be backing that up for nostalgia’s sake.