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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 An antiquated service model and outdated technology are widely blamed for the struggle.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.
Nothing lost but sad. I remember those days of geocities prospering. But I was more tripod.com guy than geocities. Hope tripod.com will live for longer. I am actually using it still for something.
o_O
My favorite part about Geocities, in 1996, was the themed Neighborhoods. The internet seemed so much smaller back then, like the number of pages could have fit into the multiple neighborhoods of Geocities. RIP Times Square
I don't remember much about Geocities, but I do remember that I absolutely HATED having their advertisements on my page.
It's funny, though, if you look at MySpace or Facebook now they're absolutely cluttered with flashy, obtrusive advertisements and I don't give it much thought. Guess it goes to show, you can get used to anything.
As somebody who learned HTML and Javascript with GeoCities, that's really too bad. Yes, GeoCities is the home of the stereotypical mid 90's "home page" with animated gifs and background MIDI music but I still occasionally come across very worthwhile information on GeoCities via Google and in terms of reliable free hosting with pretty unobtrusive ads it was pretty good. It seems somewhat rash to just shut it down outright.
I wonder if there isn't some way they could just take a snapshot of the domain as it is right now, and then keep that online. Give site owners the ability to delete their site, but no longer allow editing or uploading. That would be pretty low maintenance and certainly they still receive ad revenue from it, but maybe not enough to cover costs.
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
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i hosted my first website, a WW II history site, on geocities - before the ad requirements got out of hand. when their ads got completely obnoxious, i asked for a way to keep the ad in a top frame, or any way to keep it from covering my content, but was told to pony up cash.
random ads over WW II pictures, especially some of the pictures of fallen soldiers I had up, didn't sit well with me - so I ponied up cash for a real webhost, and didn't look back.
perhaps i'm just too good at holding a grudge, but i'm glad they're dead.
the united states is a nation of laws; badly written and randomly enforced -- frank zappa
And nothing of value was lost.
Something of great value was lost!
Unfortunately it was lost long ago.
I remember the original Geocities... well before Yahoo bought them out. It was a thriving community of Internet users, the kind of people that had Internet access but didn't have web space, or their own server to host pages.
If you can't remember a Geocities before Yahoo! then please think twice before dismissing it.
If it wasn't for Geocities, I probably wouldn't be a Web Developer now. I used to code up pages on my ageing 8086 (without a graphical web browser, so I had no way of testing), I used to take the HTML files into college which had computers powerful enough to run Netscape. After a bit of debugging, I'd upload them to Geocities and they were live!
Sure, some people had nice web servers that their companies paid for, but I couldn't afford that, I just had my college's 1KB/sec Internet connection and my free Geocities account. It served me well!
I'll miss Geocities.
I'll also miss every other service that Yahoo! butchered too! Anyone remember the original Rocketmail, OneList? WebRing? Launch.com? All Seeing Eye?
All great services ruined by Yahoo!
I still use Flickr, but I worry for its future. Yahoo! have a bad history!
Last but not least...
RIP Geocities. You served me well! It's a pity Yahoo! murdered you!
You've obviously never heard of either the now defunct Ubuntu Christian Edition or the Ubuntu Muslim Edition.
This is a sig. It is appended to the end of comments I post.
Not to mention the fact that back then the web was NEW to so many people! Shiny, fascinating and NEW! I had a page that listed my comic art collection. Many of the guy's fans contacted me thanking me for it. I became obsessed with tracking down and documenting EVERY, SINGLE, SOLITARY thing that he'd ever had published. The artist actually contacted me and asked if he could mirror it on his site when he got one a couple of years later. He actually said that he didn't remember half of the items on the list.
And there were lots of people like me on Geocities. Our pages didn't have to be good, they had to be the BEST. That fascination seems to have died off quite a bit in the past decade.
It saddens me to see the silver lining go down the drain with the rest of the cloud.
I'd say there's a good chance Google will still be around in 10 years.
You know what, 10 years ago, I'd have said that there'd be a good chance that AltaVista will still be around in 10 Years!
If you don't know what AltaVista is then you might want to Google it. 10 years ago, you'd likely have AltaVista'd Google to find out what Google was!
AltaVista is still around but it's a subsidiary of Google. I'm not saying that Google won't be around in 10 years... I'm just saying that 10 years is a long time in Internet time!
Talking of which, does anyone else remember Internet Time?
"lowest-common-denominator", like the people who can't tell "it's" from "its"?
("... contributed to it's demise ...")
They made a TOS change somewhere back in the distant past that resulted in my pulling down most of my info from my spot in TheTropics.
http://web.archive.org/web/19990128020615/www.geocities.com/TheTropics/1298/
I don't remember the details at this time.
drew
FreeMusicPush If you want to see more Free Music made, listen to Free
I think that a lot of the early wikipedia contributors came from the non-crap geocities authors. (back when it had more information about the star wars universe than it had about the real life space universe) While we don't miss that time period, (well, i do), I think that the urge to contribute to the internet (via geocities) was the same urge that created and grew wikipedia and web 2.0.
If I had to write Geocities eulogy, it would be: "Geocities paved the way for Web 2.0"
Take from that what you will, a lot of web 2.0 was "Hey! Look at me!" type crap that we equate with myspace, youtube, and Web 2.0, it was the original place where someone could contribute to the internet for free.
Is it sad that I am more likely to recognize you and your posts by your sig than your name or UID?
You were using an 8086 then? You could probably have fished a perfectly usable 286 or 386 machine out of a hospital dumpster for free, or bought such a computer for dirt cheap. I even had a 486sx/33 chip my rich (yet not pretentious) friend handed down to me around the time GC was born, though it took me a few months to get the rest of the components.
That's cool you were doing that and remember all that stuff! I remember using NCSA mosaic in 16-color windows 3.11, and how cool the beta netscape was. And before then I was serious into BBS's.
In fact, it was because of geocities that I came up with a nifty "hosting" service (namebooster.com, now owned by some squatter) that would allow you to have a domain name, and have it take you to a painfully long geocities URL. At first I did it in cgi, but then I learned apache rewrite rules that made it easier to manage. I didn't really make any money off of that, but it did open the door to some crazy adventures I encountered shortly after during the .com boom.
As much as people are bashing Geocities, consider*:
* This is going from memory, 14 years ago now.
I don't mind saying I had a GeoCities page, for several years from 1995 on. It wasn't much, but it was mine. I edited it in the college labs (faster than dialup, and free!) and shared it with friends and family from their home computers. Times were good.
Of course, I also used tables and transparent GIFs for layout; there was no CSS back then. And pay-per-minute dial-up was lousy. And there was no Google (remember having to use different search engines for different topics? I remember preferring AltaVista.) No Wikipedia, either -- Encarta was great, though. (Which reminds me, farewell, Encarta. You helped me through many a paper.)
Great; now I'm feeling nostalgic. Does anyone remember canyon.mid? Man, I used to listen to that all the time. Of course, then I discovered Impulse Tracker, and realized that MIDI was crap (except perhaps as a control language for devices.)
Yeah, I remember Xoom, along with Tripod, Angelfire, and Geocities, probably more that I'm missing, but they made up the bulk of personal webpages in the late 90's. If you got your site listed in the Yahoo Web Directory, everything was GOLDEN. There was a redirect service, w3.to, which provided short links to your pages. I ran an abandonware site at xoom, called Softcity or something like that, which provided zip files of Prince of Persia, Wolfenstein, Line Wars 2, Turbo Pascal, WFW 3.11, etc. Good times; unfortunately, I can't look it up on the web archive because robots.txt was blocked =/
The World is Yours.
Remember the one that had a giant pocketwatch telling the time on a chain? How it would swing with this kinda sorta gravity that would pull your damned cursor "off course" and it ended up a game of cups and balls trying to get the damned watch to "swing" in the direction you wanted to go? Man you are so right that kids NEED to be able to experience that mind altering state that was the combo of comet cursor+Angelfire or Geocities spacey layouts. The ones that would drive me the most nuts were the "butterfly" cursor sites because they would usually have a "Bllling!" MIDI sound when you clicked on anything and as your butterfly cursor "flapped" it would crap out fairy dust that would slow the graphics cards of the day(Even my baddass Voodoo2) down to a crawl. And those sites would be usually the ONLY source of info on some obscure artist or author.
You really should set up a simulation of those days. I'd be happy to send my nephews to it every day just to make them see what it was like "See I told you it was torture!" while playing a .wav of Sam Kinison screeching "AHHHHH I'M IN HELL!"
And for those that complained that the tits and lesbos links don't work, here are some pictures of tits and Lesbos. Enjoy. ;-)
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
...I ran a Pokemon fansite on Geocities which offered midis of the game's music, tips (really just reading Tips&Tricks and putting it on my site, kind of like blogs), information on the different versions and ROMs of the Gameboy games. I got my first Cease and Desist letter, ever, from Nintendo. Because of my Geocities site.
Geocities, you will forever be in my heart.
It's like Rule 34. For every obsolete application, piece of hardware, or system, somewhere there's some son of a bitch who picked one up at a flea market wants to find drivers for it to see how it worked.
I recently found a '486-class machine in the dumpster. It was in a small form factor case and had 8-bit ISA slots. I threw a spare CF-IDE adaptor into it and an obsolete 32MB CF card. It now boots off solid-state disk and the whole thing's passively cooled.
I was going to use it as the platform for a stone-age EPROM burner that's so old it can still burn bipolar PROMs. But it's also the perfect platform for an obsolete DOS-based "answering machine/voice mail/phone tree" phone card that I picked up at the electronic flea market. Took me about an hour to figure out how set up a "choose your own adventure" game in voicemail. Pretty neat. The original thing was designed for '286-class hardware in the late 80s.
I've still got the floppies for the EPROM burner, but it saved me hours of rummaging through the basement trying to find the storage box that contained the floppies. The other thing was so obsolete I had to google for it, and holy crap, it's all still out there. OK, so the guy wasn't hosting it on GeoCities, but it had last been updated six years ago, but it was still there.
For people who just like to play with computers, it's not just useful to have abandoned websites, it's invaluable.
I just click through members in the webring.
Ah, pointless nostalgia :-)
Who cares about the ugly designs? They were "ugly" because people actually had the freedom to upload whatever they wanted, and who goes to the internet to watch "pretty" things anyway, especially 15 years ago, when you couldn't find 2 browsers that would show a page the same way?
For the younger generation (I was 13), who hadn't been to college, we only had a dial-up connection and no way to know about ftp, gopher, usenet, etc; geocities gave us a way to experiment and learn how the internet worked.
Today everything is trapped inside something else (facebook, myspace, blogging platforms, news sites), does anyone understand what happens with their data after they publish it? where does it go, where does it come from when it shows up on their browser?
--
Stay tuned for some shock and awe coming right up after this messages!
I learned HTML from Geocities.
With earnest and a renewed sense of nostalgia, RIP Geocities.
Uuuhhh...hate to tell you, but if you had IE 4-6 you didn't actually NEED to install ANYTHING for the cursor to 'display" on a web page, thanks to the fun technology that was...dum dum dum...ActiveX! Thanks to the early security model of ActiveX you don't need to install squat for comet cursor to run! Isn't that great! of course then the malware guys figured out how truly shitty the security model on IE was and ActiveX got slaughtered. Kinda like what we are seeing now with JavaScript. Wow, what goes around comes around.
But as you can see here under the aptly named "controversy" that not only did they do some back door bundling with popular apps like Realpalyer(EEK!) but thanks to ActiveX there was the little bit of fun known as the "no click install" where just having a page load that unbeknown to you had comet cursor just like an STD you got it too! Wasn't that great! As someone who had to clean comet cursor off of more machines than I can count I can tell you that 1-It did NOT need installation before it started screwing with the cursor, thanks to ActiveX controls and the non existent security model of the IE at the time, and 2-it would "no click install" itself at the drop of a hat or the loading of a Geocities page with NO WARNING OR USER ACTION whatsoever. Again, thanks to the wonderful lack of security in the early IE ActiveX. It was just balls of fun! Almost as fun as all the users I had coming through my door pleading "Please just KILL THAT DAMNED MONKEY BEFORE I TAKE MY GUN TO THIS DAMNED THING!!!!!
Ahhhh...what a different time that was. When malware not only tried NOT to be hidden, but actually went out of its way to bug the living shit out of you. Such a strange and wonderful time that was. While I would fully support a "web 1.0" simulation of those times for future generations I am personally glad not to be living them anymore. Give me my customers malware ridden boxes that just quietly spew spam over that talking monkey or crapping cursors any day of the week. At least they are quiet.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Geocities was a progression for me as they later allowed SSI. This moved me over from frame based layout. From there I quickly hopped over to my own domain with PHP and was totally geeked out with include_once()!
I went back to the site and added meta-redirect to forward people to my blog. Must check my server logs and see if anyone comes that way.
The real value of geocities was not in the actual content it contained (although some of the content was simply awesome), but rather how it encouraged a lot of individuals to start publishing content onto the web via a personal home page. Both the skills learned and the desire to get oneself "one the Internet" that geocities (and its kin websites) provided were launchpads into the web we know now.