The Death of GeoCities: Goodnight Sweet Prince
By Dennis Wyman on October 28, 2009 12:52 AM | Permalink | 1 Comment
As
many of you are probably aware, this past Monday marks the quiet,
whimpering death of GeoCities. At one point the "go to" place for free
web hosting, it has since succumbed to corporate overlords Yahoo!, who
closed registration in April, and unceremoniously cut its life support
on the 26th of this month.For a service that essentially popularized the concept of "web sites for everybody," it is almost sad to see it go. Long before MySpace and LiveJournal hit the scene, GeoCities was one of the first places on the internet where, for free, one could setup a personal web site with minimal technical proficiency. However, since being bought by the Yahoo! juggernaut in 1999, the service stagnated as the rest of the web moved on.
Yahoo!'s failure to capitalize on GeoCities' potential has left the service steadily losing its userbase and traffic throughout the new millennium, leaving behind a massive archive of what was the origins of today's internet. Many of today's biggest tech and gaming websites started off as free pages on GeoCities. (Zangaroa's predecessor, VGRC, originated on their biggest rival, Tripod.com, who still continues today under the ownership of Lycos.) If you wanted an example of "90's Internet," all you had to do was point someone towards GeoCities. Animated gif backgrounds, road signs that were edited to say "Under Construction" and frameset-based layouts; GeoCities was an example of an internet that still hadn't reached maturity.
But after years of losing traffic, all-around general stagnation, and failing to make any real profit for Yahoo!, maybe it's for the best. Most sites on GeoCities have been near-impossible to browse anyways, having been plastered with millions of Yahoo! ads that drove most of the userbase away. Still, it's a shame to see it go, as Eliot said, "not with a bang, but with a whimper." No last huzzahs, no parties, nothing. Just pull the plug and move on. Kinda makes sense though; no sense getting attached now.
But the least we can do is salute the old dog, as Yahoo! takes it to the backwoods to plant a bullet in its skull. But it's OK kids, GeoCities is old and tired, it won't feel a thing...
Categories: Random Commentary
Tags: end of an era, geocities, goodnight sweet prince, yahoo!
1 Comment
Leave a comment
Justice McCay | May 12, 2010 9:06 PM
Wow...I am both shocked & overwhelmed with sadness to hear this news, especially so late.. :(
Yahoo! Geocities was the absolute best, but you are right with your article, with as the years progressed Geocities got nowhere. I don't understand or know why Yahoo! didn't properly maintain its Geocities service.
I used it in the early 2000's and it seemed to be a very popular place for just about everyone who was looking to get online. It taught me so much and only sparked my interest into a pit of fire to learn more and develop websites on my own etc.
It was the very first place that I had my first sites on, including my first gaming sites; and it was also the first place that I began to take an interest in web development and search to learn HTML to have functions & features that the Yahoo! Geocities WYSIWYG website editor just wasn't capable of.
Surely it will be missed, especially by me. I really respect Yahoo! for offering such a service - it really could have evolved into something big if it wasn't neglected, un-maintained, and forgotten about.
I can't believe that Yahoo! really shut all Geocities sites down though. After reading this I would have expected them to keep the sites up at least as an archive but they really deleted them all as far as I can tell. What a shame as some of my old & first affiliates were still up on the net through Geocities - it was really neat and interesting to watch the web constantly develop being able to go back to what you started with and how HTML & web design was back then.
Anyway, RIP to Yahoo! Geocities. Hopefully Yahoo! will come out with something better as a superior alternative service, though I doubt it. Yahoo! Geocities was probably the first & only that had its own feature-rich & complex FREE WYSIWYG web editor in which could be downloaded & used as an application or ran through the browser. Other services such as Google Pages & FreeWebs truly can't compete still to this day with old-school Yahoo! Geocities WYSIWYG editor.
I'm glad to see that at least AngelFire & Tripod are still up as I used them as alternatives to Geocities back in the day too. And of course BraveNet though I never used it for websites just its tools it offered for free.
Grr now that I think of it a lot of old-school sites & services are down. I can't remember the name of this one but it was had a web and a spider on its logo and it allowed you to create free basic websites and gave you a subdomain I think. And of course using like vze.com, ontheweb.com, and cjb.net as a URL shortener ahh.
The early 2000's and when vGamin was actually active and still being maintained were the days man. Things have really changed since then. :(