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Yahoo Pulls the Plug On GeoCities
Mike writes "It's official: Yahoo is pulling the plug, and GeoCities is dead. 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 An antiquated service model and outdated technology are widely blamed for the struggle.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. Awful, eye-punishing graphics, lack of relevancy, and 'lowest-common-denominator design' are believed to have contributed to its demise. GeoCities was 15 years old." There is doubtless a lot of funny and informative stuff on there that's worth saving (not just Jesux, which pudge has now migrated). If some of it belongs to you, perhaps you should move it sometime in the next few months. Update: 04/24 18:10 GMT by T : And if you know some GeoCities page owners who aren't especially computer savvy, you could point out to them how easy it is to slurp down their pages for re-hosting elsewhere.
After reminiscing about the gaudiness of some of those crappy old pages, I'd have to say they were more like the MySpace of the '90s.
John
For all the griping people do.. it wasn't that bad
And it's visual design tool really was amazing.
Users didn't need to worry about arranging stuff into tables.. you could just drag your graphic where ever you wanted .. or put text anywhere.. etc.
Sure, it let a lot of garbage leak onto the Internet.. but it also let people with something interesting to contribute an easy way of doing so.
And lets face it.. was the output of a geocities website designed with the visual designer that much different than most of the myspace pages you see? (that isn't an endorsement for myspace..). If you have interesting content.. the design matters a lot less (and again.. not saying that myspace contains interesting content).
Imagine Google, Facebook and Twitter 10 years from now.
I don't know, when researching some really really old file formats for some old games, I found that a lot of documentation for them was held on sites like geocities, long since forgotten about and destined to be lost if Yahoo just pulls the plug completely. No doubt there's a fair amount of information littered over the service amidst all of the Frontpage 97 templated gif-fests.
At the very least, they should let archive.org or something back the whole damn thing up, it may have been a rubbish service, but it's still an important part of internet history.
That and they'd actually be able to supply some decent bandwidth to the things.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
I hate the guts out of myspace and facebook. Seriously. There is no content. For example, I search for a new 'hip' band, so they only have a myspace page. Now, try to find the band biography or past tourdates. You won't find it. Instead, you will see a list of pictures of 'friends' of the band, about whom you couldn't care less. In that respect, Geocities actuallý was better, because at least you had a chance (even if it was small) of finding useful information there.
molmod.com - computing tips from a molecular modeling
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
More likely, you're just using Adblock like most Slashdotters and never even see them.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
I'd say there's a good chance Google will still be around in 10 years. I'd say there's very little chance Facebook is. And I'd say there's not a snowball's chance in Hell that Twitter is around in 5 years, never mind 10.
I'd like to thank 'em giving even the tiniest bit of free webspace when nobody else did.
The reason we cann all remember Geocities was because there was neat stuff on it!!! Geocities was home to all the quirky people who had all sorts of goodies to post on the web, and no other means to do so.
I don't really see facebook disappearing any time soon, there is an awful lot of value there for the people who use it. It's the equivalent of a "box of polariods" for about half of all college students in the US.
I'd agree with the awful .gif's and styles, but they had a lot more going for them than myspace.
Geocities had a lot of content. A huge amount of useful information. Especially the pre-Yahoo stuff. Many times over the last decade I've ended up on a Geocities website when researching particular subjects (sorry - can't give any examples, but more than a couple dozen times when looking at some obscure stuff).
This is sad, but bound to happen. For a long while Geocities was the only place hobbyists could spew their knowledge. Now it's all over the place. Hopefully the internet archive can hold on to some of those soon-to-be lost gems.
Ain't it the truth. Geocities attracted some of the most eye-gougingly terrible amateur designs, but shit, a lot of those people went on to lose the colorblindness, but kept the technical know-how they gained with their first little hobby site. I certainly did.
Here's where everyone neglects the fact that Geoshitties was a huge lead-up to the blog.
People with no interest in html, css, hosting, dns, etc. want to brain-dump on the intarwebs too. Geocities did it first, now you go start a blog.
Unfortunately like all good resources, diamonds in the rough. You have to wade through so much shit that you end up almost giving up. Almost... then you find the gem, and cherish it.
While it is sad to see it gone, the horrid gaudy gif sites will not be missed.
If you don't maintain it, they will leave.
I'd say there's a good chance Google will still be around in 10 years. I'd say there's very little chance Facebook is. And I'd say there's not a snowball's chance in Hell that Twitter is around in 5 years, never mind 10.
Do you have any evidence for these statements, or do you just happen to like Google and hate the other two(like a good /.er should)?
Google's likely to stick around because it's so large, and still trends very well. They do a lot of innovative things, and lots of us are using them for our email. They'll very likely change, and we might not think of them as a Search company (exclusively) anymore, but they'll be around. So here, I agree with you.
Facebook is huge, but then again, so was Myspace in 2003. Of course, Myspace hasn't gone anywhere - it's just not as trendy as Facebook. I agree that social networking will lose some luster, but for huge numbers of the internet population, social networking of some sort is a prime reason to be online. This is especially true in the younger set, and there's just going to be more of them. Facebook might not be a big player in 10 years. Maybe it'll adapt/create some sort of open standard for social networking. There's no way it'll just be gone.
Twitter's interesting - it's a very new service and an honestly new type of thing online. I think it'll change and might be unrecognizable by users today, but there's no reason to think it'll disappear - it's very useful for its intended purpose, and there's a lot of evidence to support that it's in a prime position to replace group chat (think IRC, chatrooms, etc). It certainly has a lot of the same functionality.
If you'd asked people in 2000 about some crazy new thing called "blogging" (especially people on slashdot), a bunch would have said it was just a boring trend that would disappear before long. It's evolved, and so will Twitter and Facebook. Don't let the irrational slashdot hate of the two services cloud your judgment.
More like a filing cabinet of polaroids. My "friends" on Facebook often take 50+ photos of every single event and post them all. Most of the pictures aren't even worth saving. (Such as the ones with me in them :)
Parent isn't /funny/. He's being dead serious, that's how it was back in the late '90s.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
That is curious. I pay for hosting and I couldn't be happier. Why free? If you die, do you want your site to be available for years after? Is $100 a year too much for 100 GB of storage and 100 GB of file transfers per month and unlimited domain names? I have a free page http://networkzombie.googlepages.com/ but it doesn't let me do whatever I want, and storage is 100 MB, so I don't (or can't) do anything serious with it. I think the limitations of free sites, like ads and bandwidth restrictions, make them overrated. What do you do with your free site?
Anybody else adopt atheism after viewing that second link?
More likely, you're just using Adblock like most Slashdotters and never even see them.
By odds, sure. All I use though is Flashblock and disabling just annoying javascript features not the whole thing, basically the stuff that can actually get in my way but leaving whatever degree of visually obtrusive ads remain. I can really just block them out 99% of the time, not even registering them. Largely from browsing the web in that time before enlightened browsers, but after animated gifs.
I remember reading on /. many years ago about a study where people try to find information on some websites, and consistently fail to see the giant gaudy supposedly eye-catching graphics telling them exactly what they want to know, instead busily scanning the web site's text. Heh, seemed about right to me, when I'm trying to find something specific I don't even see the bright flashing shit that seems designed to catch my eye.
For that last 1%, I'll admit I also have Nuke Anything, which is also nice for fixing broken web pages where a sidebar will mis-render and block an article and such.
I'll
The enemies of Democracy are
Nope, had it set to medium, because pretty much NO sites including my bank at the time(WTF?) would work correctly on high. You see my friend you are forgetting the wonderful world that was the web with ActiveX. Need a scrollbar on your page? ActiveX! Want a clock? ActiveX! Buttons, menus, hell there were so many pages that you couldn't do a damned thing without ActiveX that setting security in IE to high was the same as trying to uninstall IE and go back to FTP. Nothing worked. kinda like flash now.
Go to any major corps(especially anyone involved with media) websites with flash disabled. Go ahead, I'll wait. What's that? You just get a plugin symbol in the middle of a blank page and can't go anywhere? Welcome to 1997 and what it was like to surf without any ActiveX. Folks forget the kind of marketing MSFT put behind ActiveX. It was going to solve all your web page problems and make the link between desktop and server obsolete! You will be able to make rich web apps in seconds and your users will be able to use them just as if they were built in! No Install Required! if you want to see how much that attitude spread across the web, you only have to look up the fact that IE6 usage goes up between Mon-Fri. That is because so much of the corporate Intranet was built during those days and still needs IE6 to run ActiveX, and the users simply surf with it. Scary,huh?
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
You jest, but I honestly felt nauseous after seeing that.
No existe.