Goodbye GeoCities
It pains us to write this, but GeoCities, one of the Internet's early and most popular places for posting a personal website, ends today.
It's one of the cruelties of the modern era that history may not be preserved. Even in the U. S. government, critical issues discussed via email and text messaging can vanish at the touch of a few buttons.
Geocities technically began in 1994, when most people not only hadn't used the Internet, but didn't even know what it was. But it didn't really get going until 1995. The site was divided into loosely themed "neighborhoods," like Area51 and Hollywood. A person's personal url originally would be an address like http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Dimension/8484/. As the Internet advanced, these could be shortened to the domain name plus user name, like http://www.geocities.com/bloodstar84.
Many people's first websites were there. Our friend BloodStar built his in the 1990s, and it was the first place anyone could find Reverend Loveshade's work online, including the now well-known "Five Blind Men and an Elephant" (the second place was http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Zone/7971). It held one of the early online references to Apocrypha Discordia, which back then wasn't a real book.
Alden built his first website there in 1997, and still considers it his second favorite self-built sites (the first is this site, of course). Friendships and even marriages happened through that site, which was the third most visited in its heyday. Some people grew up there, posting as young teenagers and continuing into their college years.
And now, with one swipe of Yahoo's axe, it will be gone. For a while now, it hasn't been possible to start a new site or even to edit one that's already there. But as Yahoo! now offers everyone free email with unlimiitd storage, keeping the sites up would likely take very little. Back in the day, you got what was a whooping big 15 megabytes of space for your website. And most sites weren't nearly that big, meaning you could easily save 100,000 of them on a $200 flash drive. But Yahoo! won't do it.
Thanks goodness http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/04/28/geocities_preservation/ has been working to save what they can. This is real history, the personal, amateur groundwork on which the personal and corporate blog were built. Decades from now, when people are downloading a history book of the Internet into their brain, GeoCities will be an important part of the book.
Goodbye, old friend.
Comments
So much will be lost. I didn't care for the Stick Figure Death Theater and (Somebody) ate my balls, but that Dancing Baby was cute. And so many photos and poetry and animated gifs. If the group did save it, how will the rest of us see it?
Posted by: TawTew the Naturally Perfumed | October 26, 2009 04:08 PM
So many really, really bad sites are gone. What a shame.
Posted by: Rev. Bootie | October 26, 2009 10:23 PM
There were some nice sites there. I know some churches even had a website on GeoCities, and there was a lot of fun user art and writing and stories. It was a fun place to visit, most of it unprofessional, but it was breaking new ground. I'll miss it.
Posted by: Christian Andy | October 27, 2009 02:49 PM
They shouldn't just take it away. They should have saved it for an online museum.
Posted by: Marie Gilbert | October 28, 2009 05:13 AM
I will miss it
Posted by: Vernon Avaritt | October 28, 2009 02:58 PM
Yahoo's lost something. It was great back in the day, but they've gotten so profit hungry they don't care much about users anymore. How much would it have cost them to just keep the sites up? Not much, especially when they paid so much to buy it. I read it gets like 10 million visitors. Maybe they'll go somewhere else, and Yahoo will get the message.
Posted by: Edna the Wrinkled Peach | October 28, 2009 06:15 PM
Geocities was internationall, so it will be mourned that way too. It seems almost nothing's national anymore, for the world sees everything.
Posted by: Arthur Hill | October 31, 2009 03:08 AM
Geocities dead and gone,
Help me bang that old death gong.
Posted by: MJ Lover | November 1, 2009 05:56 AM
This is just stupid.
Posted by: Frank | November 2, 2009 04:56 AM
This is history. History shouldn't just bed eleted like that. There was more than a million sites there and for a few bucks they could have saved them all. But not for the profit margin that doesn't care about preserving the past. Yahoo is a money grubbing corporation that doesn't care about people.
Posted by: Fire Chief | November 5, 2009 12:54 AM
I never had a site there but really this is sad. Its like what if they deleted all Twitter or Facebook or YouTube?
Really my first sites were on MSN and they deleted all them too. I was 13 when I made my first website and that was like years ago cuz Im 21 now. But its all gone. Its like everythings just thrown away nobody cares. I hope somebody saved the MSN sites and Geocities too.
Posted by: Lorien Loveshade | November 7, 2009 06:47 AM
Don't you worry, girl. They'll kill Twitter and Facebook and YouTube too. Just you wait.
Posted by: Rev. Bootie | November 10, 2009 01:07 PM
Geocities is part of the past. It's gone, let's move on.
Posted by: Free Ovaries | December 5, 2009 06:21 PM
Goodbye Geoshitties.
Posted by: Labial Dentist | December 8, 2009 03:57 AM
Goodbye, Yellow Brick Road.
Posted by: Wilson Frank Thomas | December 11, 2009 08:57 PM
Geocities is gone. But good news is http://www.reocities.com saved most of it. Check out the site.
Posted by: Andrew | May 21, 2010 12:28 AM