Geocities: The End of an Era and a Community
Share October 23, 2009 | Internet, Zen Musings
I will definitely miss GeoCities.
For those who don’t remember or possibly weren’t born yet, GeoCities was a Web Community in which people (aka “homesteaders”) could find their own place on the Web.
I really liked the idea of being a pioneer and staking one’s claim, and getting one’s own home on the web.
I really enjoyed the concept of picking an area or city to live, finding a vacant lot in a city block and watching it grow into a nice house!
With the closure of GeoCities, Yahoo! no longer offers free webpage hosting. Yahoo! encouraged users to upgrade their accounts to the fee-based Yahoo! Web Hosting service.
Fortunately, I’ve moved my GeoCities site over here!
Paris and Bourbon Street
My first two websites were in Paris and Bourbon Street. In Paris I had a site devoted to writing and poetry, while in Bourbon Street I focused on jazz.
Then Yahoo came and bought GeoCities, and in my most humble opinion they pretty much bulldozed over everything and took the fun away from the concept of homes, city blocks, cities, and my place on the digital frontier.
Corporate Takeover
At the height of all its glory, GeoCities was the 3rd most popular destination on the World Wide Web, behind Yahoo and AOL. It was a corporate move that destroyed GeoCities, and shortly afterward we experienced the DotCom bubble burst.
But GeoCities was highly popular before the takeover. There were no real problems. GeoCities went public and I believe their stock reached $100 per share at one point.
On October 26, 2009 – The End of an Internet Era
Anyway, on October 26, 2009, Yahoo will shutdown GeoCities for good, and if you haven’t moved your old site by now, you need to do so very soon. While moving my old site to my PC, I did experience some traffic problems as I expected a multitude of GeoCities users have waited until the last minute to transfer their sites.
The Internet Archive, a nonprofit founded to build an Internet library and archive the public Web, is working to archive as many GeoCities web sites as possible before GeoCities closes on October 26, 2009.
The other option is to transfer your old GeoCities account to Yahoo webhosting service. It’s relatively inexpensive and you can pay until you have transferred your site to a better place, then close your Yahoo service.
Learning as a Homesteader
Many of us old-timers had cut our webdesign teeth over at GeoCities. Back then, being the new digital frontier it was a wonderful time to explore, create and hone our webmaster skillz.
I think Yahoo could’ve at least done something amazing like converting GeoCities to a Facebook-like social networking site, thus resurrecting it and continue to make it useful and up-to-date in the new social media era!
Anyway, so long and farewell, GeoCities. It was a wonderful time pre-Yahoo!
Posted by Randomguru | Comments (View Comments)
Carlos (a.k.a Randomguru) is a working musician, web developer and web publisher living in San Diego, California.