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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 An antiquated service model and outdated technology are widely blamed for the struggle.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.
RIP Geocities, the Friendster of the 90's generation.
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.
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).
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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The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.
Prodigy tried the flashy nasty ad thing before AOL and was pulverized for it. AOL made a whole business plan around it.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
"Awful, eye-punishing graphics, lack of relevancy, and 'lowest-common-denominator design' are believed to have contributed to it's demise."
Sounds like myspace
GeoCities:
Learn HTML, post Animated Gifs, Blare Midis
MySpace:
post Animated Gifs, Blare Mp3s
YouTube:
Blare "Animated" Videos with Sound
Twitter:
Blare
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
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
Where will we go for our fix of lousy, horribly formatted websites from 1997?
I feel bad for this sucker:
WHAT A SHAMBLES & A POOR SHOW. NO ONE WANTS TO KNOW EITHER. FORTUNATELY I SAVED MY WEBPAGE & TRANSFERRED IT TO GEOCITIES.
Link Here: http ://geocities.yahoo.com/v/gcp_choose/
Real easy to do a simple webpage. With more time I think this could be better than aol.
Is this a news report or a trailer for a motion picture?
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
It'll probably be more like Google, Google and Google 10 years from now.
This is a sig. It is appended to the end of comments I post.
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 was working at yahoo in the early days and I got the job of working to integrate the stuff geocities was doing with some of our stuff. The moment I met them I was convinced these were the wrong sort of people to be working for yahoo. They developed on Windows by Crom! When anyone asks when yahoo started going downhill I point to the GeoCities acquisition.
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.
<blink>This Comment Is Still Under Construction</blink>
(yes, even after 15 years)
And this is a spinning GIF logo. Your browser is just too tasteful to display it.
Da Blog
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.
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 have a few websites on Geocities because it is a free web hosting solution. Anyone have a suggestion as to where I should go?
God spoke to me.
You slashdotted Geocities! Most impressive!
As if millions of internet web pages suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened....
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?
If you don't maintain it, they will leave.
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 :)
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.
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?
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.)
...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.
I don't think there will be a 'Google' in ten years, I am more thinking there will be a 'Google-Starbucks-Boeing-WalMart-America-China' super entity that reigns over the known universe and controls everything via an AI named 'GORT-Hal-Skynet.'
Luckily for us, I think we will still have the real Arnold Schwarzenegger for defense, and if not, we will always have digitized CGI models of him to wage binary wars on the new GooMartBucksWangCletusPlane superstructure....
Motorcycles, Robots, Space Gossip and More!
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!
They can't shut it down, my site is still under construction!
Ah, but do you remember AltaVista before they bought the altavista.com domain name? It used to be altavista.digital.com! Of course DEC became Compaq which became HP, and as others have corrected you, Yahoo! now owns AltaVista.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
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.