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 An antiquated service model and outdated technology are widely blamed for the struggle.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.

Comments

good memories

[f1vlad]

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.

The Neighborhoods

[kingbilly]

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

Re:The Neighborhoods

[Eil]

My favorite part about Geocities, in 1996, was the themed Neighborhoods.

I had SiliconVally/8043 over a decade ago. Even back then it bothered me that they didn't really do much with the Neighborhood concept other than to categorize sites. I always thought it could have been something that allowed people to network and find others with similar tastes and ideas. Basically a poor-man's version of social networking sites that are all the rage today.

I've got to be getting old, there were so many really good ideas back then that got about 90% of the way towards the major Internet trends that we see today only to completely fall over into obscurity well before their time.

The internet seemed so much smaller back then, like the number of pages could have fit into the multiple neighborhoods of Geocities.

I used to have a copy of the Internet Yellow Pages. A physical book. The same size and shape as a telephone yellow-pages. At the time it was printed, it listed most of the relevant sites devoted to a particular subject and it was actually pretty darn thorough. Most of the URLs back then were .edu, .gov, or .net. Only a few .com and almost no .org. There were a few entries for FTP and Gopher sites scattered here and there as well. Good times. I wonder if I still have that book stashed away somewhere, the Internet was such an incredibly different place back then.

Advertisement

[enderjsv]

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.

Re:Advertisement

[mackil]

I don't remember much about Geocities, but I do remember that I absolutely HATED having their advertisements on my page.

An old trick we used back in the day was to open a noscript tag, but not close it. This kept all the ads from showing up. Of course you couldn't run javascript on it from there, but in 1998, who cared.

Too Bad

[nmb3000]

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.

Re:Value

[telchine]

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!

Re:The ruins of the old Internet

[Rival]

For those who might enjoy a walk down memory lane, here is a list of all the GeoCities neighborhoods, their suburbs, and the dates when they were added. Kudos to this gentleman for preserving a bit of history.

As much as people are bashing Geocities, consider*:

• Their ad requirements, while irritating, were tame compared to most social sites today.
• Animated GIFs were obnoxious, but are nothing compared to the Flash animations of today.
• They provided free web-hosting, with no requirement to use their page builder. CMSs are good in certain contexts, but being forced to use them is bad.
• Many people were less interested in page hits and more interested in sharing information. This does not seem to be the case as much anymore.

* 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.)

Back in the Day...

[denmarkw00t]

...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.