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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 An antiquated service model and outdated technology are widely blamed for the struggle.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).
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
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'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.
Parent isn't /funny/. He's being dead serious, that's how it was back in the late '90s.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
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