There goes the neighborhood

[greatbear]

It's a sad day in the world wide web today. No, really, it is. Today marks the final moments for GeoCities, the ground-breaking free web hosting service that so many (including myself) made use of in the early days of the int@rweb. Yahoo bought up GeoCities during the dotcom boom for a couple billion dollars. Once the third-highest trafficked site on the web, it's since dropped down somewhere around 192. Yahoo has decided that the once proud service is no longer worth the time and effort and is to pull the plug sometime today. Site owners were sent emails warning of the impending closure. After today, the site goes dark permanently.

This does not surprise me at all, yet I still feel sad. I actually had a couple sites I put together starting back in late '95. I knew quite a few people who had site on the service as well, some of whom I discovered through the early concept of webrings, which GeoCities pioneered. I dabbled in HTML and Java for the first time on the site, eventually incorporating an on-page webcam that was the source of countless hours of, well, fun. Around the turn of the century (I still love using that term) I mostly let my pages stagnate, in fact, the bio pages listed my age as 36 (that's over 11 years difference now). A few weeks ago, after getting a "final notice" of the termination of service, I went in, did a wget of all pages and files, then deleted all content, sparing my personal pages their ignominious demise via corporate decision.

Yahoo did not offer much in the way of help as far as relocating content to another service. If you paid for the GeoCities Pro service, there was an option to move all content to Yahoo Web Hosting. To the countless free users, it's all up to you. The site will be decommissioned, with all data irretrievably lost, forever. Personal pages of all kinds will be gone. There are people who have died who's pages were a constant memorial to their owners. There were lots of simple pages made as little outposts for people to have a "presence" on the web. Tons of hobbyist sites, photo pages, band sites, you name it. All will be gone with a flip of a switch, basically. Some efforts were being made to try and capture as many pages and sites from the servers before it all goes dark, with dubious success. All told, there was about 10 terabytes of data comprising the whole of GeoCities. Hell, I actually have a little more than that available on one server in the basement now. How the world has changed. And not really for the better.

Take a moment to remember those early days of the 'net, if you were like me and part of it. It was a lot of fun, but a lot of work too. Nowadays, it seems too easy, with an app for this or that, Facebook, Twitter, blogging, etc. Back then, though, all those garish sites took a lot of work. But it was so worth it. I'll miss it. Especially after seeing what I had abandoned all those years ago.

Comments

[erstexman.livejournal.com]

Wow - I did not even know that GeoCities was even still around. I remember well playing bear roulette on there pre-bear411.

[thehoodwatch.livejournal.com]

I had so many websites on GeoCities. Unfortunately my HTML skills also peaked around that era. I wish I could even remember what my sites were so I could have had one last look.

[greatbearmd.livejournal.com]

I had a few. Two of them I "rescued", the rest vanished most likely because they were abandoned. I had to make some minor change to a single page in order for the system to not mark them as abandoned. I just let those go that I had 'forgotten'.

[bigredpaul.livejournal.com]

I still remember the weird address scheme they had. I had a WestHollywood/3800 address, before Yahoo bought them and they switched it to usernames as the naming scheme.

[greatbearmd.livejournal.com]

That's the thing, so many people thought it was gone long ago. THe site was there the whole time, it's just that people's minds were now elsewhere.

[greatbearmd.livejournal.com]

I had two in WestHollywood, but only kept the one going, plus I had a few in automotive and techie 'neighborhoods'.

[aadroma.livejournal.com]

Ah memories. I remember being envious of a friend because they had a webpage on Geocities! WITH GRAPHICS! And all I had was simple plain HTML on Prodigy Internet. :: laugh ::

[ciddyguy.livejournal.com]

I had a website on Geocities free and it's prolly gone and I never got notice of this and probably because I didn't update it in probably a year so it may have been termed as abandoned, shrug.

Their page builder program was funky as hell but did the job. Now I need to work on my html skillz and rebuild over on go daddy.com as a pay member.

I've always felt Geocities was the suxors but then again, I put that page up several years ago but I think long after it had begun the slide into oblivion.

[meddler-inc.livejournal.com]

Damn, I forgot about that.

Yeah, Geocities was my place for webdesign. I remember hunting the college library for HTML manuals and teaching myself basic webpage design. What a shame. *sigh*

[2stroker.livejournal.com]

I had a site on there but could never really master it.Managed to get a picture up and a short bio but then got lost . I could never master ,or for that matter,even begin to understand that HTML stuff.WebRing offered to pick up any page from Geocities. I have 2 Yahoo groups that I set up for antique motorcycles and have them linked to WebRing but,I didn't feel it was worth the effort to move my tiny little page so it's now gone into the darkness of space!

[champdaddy.livejournal.com]

I had similar feelings of sadness when aol did away with all their homepages. But as far as GeoCities is concerned, the first thing that comes to mind is those damned pop-ups!

[budmassey.livejournal.com]

Does this mean that we will finally see and end to animated GIF's, background images that repeat like playing cards, annoying MIDI files, decorative horizontal rules, and all manner of infantile buttons and bars?

I admit to once having a site there, and one of my favorite fetish sites was hosted there (Under the Lash: A Pictorial History of Flogging). So I do have mixed feelings about the demise of GeoCities. But I actually decided not to seek further clients for web design simply because everybody I had the opportunity to work with was trying to replicated either their GeoCities page or their AOL page, complete with all the aforementioned offenses, and I couldn't bear to see another one of my sites "enhanced" by the owner's insertion of those abominations.

Of course, there is the WayBack Machine site, so maybe you can reminisce there when you need to see how bad it once was.

[fingertrouble.livejournal.com]

I started on Geocities back in 1996 or early 1997. I'll miss it also.

I did take my site off there a long time ago though - Yahoo really fucked up Geocities.

[mikiedoggie.livejournal.com]

Thanks for posting this; it reminded me when the web was still in its infancy, Netscape was the only web browser out there. Geocities was my first webpage. I still remember the address: CapitolHill/Lobby/3801.