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 An antiquated service model and outdated technology are widely blamed for the struggle.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

RIP

[daveime]

RIP Geocities, the Friendster of the 90's generation.

Re:RIP

[plover]

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.

Re:RIP

[Kugrian]

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.

Re:RIP

[ausekilis]

Gems like this?
VF Designer
Unfortunately the pain isn't limited to geocities... more pain here.

Re:RIP

[nametaken]

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.

Re:RIP

[sortius_nod]

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.

Re:RIP

[WhatAmIDoingHere]

I had like 14 seizures from that second link, bro.

Gotta throw a warning up next time.

Re:RIP

[Nimey]

Parent isn't /funny/. He's being dead serious, that's how it was back in the late '90s.

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.

Re:good memories

[Kinky Bass Junk]

Hope tripod.com will live for longer. I am actually using it still for something.

Propping up a camera?

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.

Meh..

[Anrego]

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).

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.

hmm. familiar

[Anonymous Coward]

"Awful, eye-punishing graphics, lack of relevancy, and 'lowest-common-denominator design' are believed to have contributed to it's demise."

Sounds like myspace

Progress?

[clinko]

GeoCities:
Learn HTML, post Animated Gifs, Blare Midis

MySpace:
post Animated Gifs, Blare Mp3s

YouTube:
Blare "Animated" Videos with Sound

Twitter:
Blare

Re:Progress?

[Bieeanda]

Yes, we're finally getting that annoying 'signal' out of our noise.

Re:Value

[neokushan]

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.

Speak for yourself

[pimpimpim]

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.

Re:Speak for yourself

[DavidD_CA]

It's the band's fault if their MySpace/Facebook page doesn't have any good information, tour dates, or anything else that might be useful.

I've seend plenty of excellent band pages. Unfortunately, the sucky ones outweigh the good ones, but don't blame MySpace.

(There's plenty of other things to hate MySpace for.)

Re:hmm. familiar

[neokushan]

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

While most here are going to rag on Geocities ...

[phoxix]

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 there when GeoCities was acquired

[rizzo5]

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.

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:good riddance to bad rubbish

[Anonymous Coward]

especially some of the pictures of fallen soldiers I had up, didn't sit well with me...perhaps i'm just too good at holding a grudge, but i'm glad they're dead.

The beauty of context.

I felt a great disturbance in the force

[mysidia]

As if millions of internet web pages suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened....

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.

Re:It hurts me inside

[BJ_Covert_Action]

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....

I need more time!

[canonymous]

They can't shut it down, my site is still under construction!