So Long, GeoCities: We Forgot You Still Existed (died today)

[Tab]

Source: PC World

GeoCities, a free Web hosting service that achieved fame in the mid-90s, died Thursday at the Yahoo headquarters in Silicon Valley. GeoCities was 15 years old.

GeoCities had suffered a long and drawn-out battle with its health over the past decade. An antiquated service model and outdated technology are widely blamed for the struggle. An official cause of death, however, has yet to be determined.

GeoCities: 1995 - 2009

GeoCities was born as "Beverly Hills Internet" in the winter of 1995. Its parents, David Bohnett and John Rezner, wanted to create a virtual community that mimicked the real world, with pages hosted in "cyber cities" and other similarly nauseating concepts.

Both teenagers and first-generation Internet dorks (known then as "former SysOps") flocked to the service, setting up personal pages in the "cyber cities" of their choice. Despite GeoCities' built-in watermarks and on-page advertisements, the site's popularity continued to climb, and the shame its users should have felt for creating abhorrent content within its servers continued to remain repressed.
...
The GeoCities site is expected to remain functional through midyear as a tribute to its life. Funeral arrangements are now pending.

Read more: http://www.pcworld.com/article/163765/so_long_geocities_we_forgot_you_still_existed.html

---

I'm shedding no tears. Piece of crap hosting service.

[ACTION BASTARD]

1. I never liked the site. It was so unapealing. Yes, please die.

[AlphaCentauri]

2. it was a piece of crap but it did share a lot info, like tripod or xoom

hope they create an archive to search for tips on cooking chinese food, dog training etc,

[Sen. Walter Sobchak]

3. but the worst web designs in history live on in MySpace

[Tab]

8. Not to mention all their frickin' pop-up ads

God, those were annoying.

[Kind of Blue]

9. What a monstrosity!

:wow: Surely you jest and this is not for real.

[angstlessk]

4. I recall visiting it in the 90's and thinking it might be something I might do...then I got

distracted...I may have been the Clinton impeachment or maybe Newt's Contract on America..I don't recall!

[Blue_Tires]

29. I was out doing the macarena!

shame about geocities; r.i.p.

never used it personally to make a page, but had some friends with their own pages... back then of course they kept calling it "GeoShitties"

[w4rma]

5. That sucks. (nt)

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

6. Ok, so where can you find a place to host free websites

I have several free sites at geocities and this is the first time I heard of this--I want to be ready when they shut it down.

[Divine Discontent]

15. hi ayeshahaqqiqa! I have a family photo album on there, sigh, this is frustrating, whenever you get

something done, it closes or they change the damn rules! I spent several days over the years on the album. I'll have to find something else to host my album now. Flickr I guess? I got an acct there a few months ago, I think that might suffice.

peace,
Divine Discontent (formerly known as themartyred)

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

27. I'm thinking of putting photos there

I got an account and think that might be the place to house many of my photos.

My main concern is my genealogy site, as it contains copies of primary sources (copies of wills, etc) that other genealogists use. I will go to rootsweb and see if they still offer free websites and if so will post my documents there.

[sofa king]

33. Photobucket is a good site.

I use them to host the bizarre content I create for DU. Once in awhile, they're overwhelmed, but usually their stuff can stand thousands of hits before they remove it.

Here's a test. If the picture is gone by the time you read this, it means I'm full of poopy.

[Divine Discontent]

34. Marxist! well, I saw it 14 min after you posted it, does that count? thanks for the advice!

[Iowa]

18. Dupe

[Iowa]

19. Many ISPs provide free space...

Mine does. Other than that, I have never seen a free web hosting service that didn't completely suck. Some of the paid services are getting pretty cheap - I saw one the other day for $1.99/month. If I didn't have access to space provided by my ISP, I'd find a cheap paid service and use that.

[imdjh]

7. Like Topol, I thought it was dead.

It got to the point where anything with a geo address was probably useless.

[EFerrari]

10. They did a pretty good job at the time. That's too bad. n/t

[valerief]

11. Hmm, my site is still there. nt

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

28. It will be until mid summer

went to geocities to check on my site and that is the message there.

[high density]

12. Another thing that Yahoo bought just to kill

GeoCities
Broadcast.com
eGroups

Who else?

[Sultana]

13. wut

:cry: :cry: :cry: :cry: :cry: :cry: :cry:













































































:P

[X_Digger]

14. saw that while searching on altavista the other day..

Oh wait, I was flashing back to 1995.

[jb5150]

16. Oh well,

we still have the dancing baby......what?......Oh my God, NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO....

[davidinalameda]

25. don't be smacking on the dancing baby

that was the only reason I ever watched Allie McBeal

[Ian David]

17. Yahoo is evil. n/t

[NEOBuckeye]

20. In GeoCities' Defense...

It wasn't really that bad in it's pre-Yahoo days. For people who were new to the web during the late 90's boom, GeoCities was a great place to play around and learn the basics of HTML, Java, JavaScript and web page design, for better or for worse, and for free. Also keep in mind that buying a domain and a virtual account was much more expensive a decade ago, compared to now. It was also fairly easy in the early days to interact with other "GeoCitizens" and find help and support for image and general graphic design. I assure you that more than a few professional web designers got their start there.

When Yahoo bought out GeoCities in 1999, they proceeded to pitch out and destroy most of what made GeoCities unique and worthwhile in the first place, including the "web community" concept. It was at that point, circa 2000, that most "GeoCitizens" pulled up stakes and got out of Virtual Dodge. GeoCities at that point essentially became the third rate, web hosting arm of Yahoo, and a poorly supported one at that. Stagnant and mostly directionless for the following decade, Yahoo missed out on several critical opportunities to revitalize GeoCities, including the rapid rise of blogging and social networking as dominant forms of web communication and interactivity. GeoCities could have been a decent competitor in these areas, if only it had been entered into the race...

Yahoo may have announced GeoCities imminent death, but the truth is that it has been brain dead and on life support since around 2000. As they say, the operation was a success -- GeoCities merger into Yahoo -- but the patient died. May it rest in peace.

[LeftHander]

30. Red velvet backgrounds and 3d spinning logos on fire.....

won't be missed.

[caseycoon]

21. Oh yuck!

Thanks for posting this.

[pinniped]

22. I think they invented the pop-up.

.

[Oak2004]

24. That they did

inspiring legions of beginning programmers to invent the "popup blocker".

Geocities gave so many of us our start, for better or worse ;)

[Oak2004]

23. Geocities, in 1995, is where I tought myself the basics of web design

It was a very good thing in its early days, when hosting prices were out of the reach of many people.

I was already on my way out, and maintaining (loosely speaking) a stub website that directed visitors to the (paid hosting) websites I spun off my original Geocities site, when Yahoo came along to destroy it.

Anyone here who has no idea what to do with their Geocities site(s) can IM me, and I'll try to help. Worst case scenario, I can temporarily host a few sites on the server I maintain (which costs about as much per month as my first shared hosting account cost me, for those who forget what hosting costs were like back then, and how Geocities played an important part in the growth of the World Wide Web).

[Dogmudgeon]

26. It was TEH SH1T in 1996

Oh well ... on to Blogging.

--d!

[shraby]

31. It's where I taught myself to make web pages in 1995 also,

I'm grateful it was available or the whole process of learning would have been much harder.

[sofa king]

32. As a researcher, Geocities was a big red flag for me.

It used to be a little easier to discern what is a "fact" and what isn't. If it was on Geocities, it was suspect until verified by a reputable source.

Once in a while, I'd get a good nugget of information that could be developed, but most of the time, whatever someone on Geocities said in cyan sixteen-point Times New Roman... was wrong.

[bikebloke]

35. I've had a site with them since '99-ish

It's a jokey Scottish site. But then they made you jump through so many hoops just to update your own site, that I drifted away. It still gets about a hundred visits a month.

Now, my creative juices flow towards video and vlogging.

[hunter]

36. It's the refrigerator art of the world wide web's early childhood.

I'm trusting someone will take a few nice snapshots of it before they put it all away in the attic.

archive.org managed to grab some of my stuff.

A few political sites I remember from my various geocities wanderings seem to have gone done the memory hole.

I sometimes wonder what sort of gaming was going on behind them.

[customerserviceguy]

37. Unless a website has a viable plan to make income

it is doomed to die. Your Twitter, Facebook, and Photobucket are all in the same boat. Google survived by selling the top spots on the searches, most of the other "free" sites have the same vulnerabilities that GeoCities had.