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GeoCities Japan Is Finally Shutting Down (qz.com)
"A decade ago, internet users who grew up with Web 1.0 bid a fond farewell to Sunset Strip, Rodeo Drive, Colosseum, and other 'neighborhoods' on web-hosting service GeoCities, when Yahoo announced it was shutting the main site down," writes Isabella Steger for Quartz. "Now Japanese GeoCities fans will face the same fate." From the report: Yahoo Japan announced today (Oct. 1) that it will shut down (link in Japanese) its GeoCities service in March 2019, 22 years after its launch. The company said in a statement that it was hard to encapsulate in one word the reason for the shut down, but that profitability and technological issues were primary factors. It added that it was full of "regret" for the fate of the immense amount of information that would be lost as a result of the service's closure. Japan is the only country where the web hosting service remained in operation. Like the main GeoCities, the Japanese service was also organized around different themed neighborhoods. For example, websites in the Silicon Valley neighborhood were tech-focused, while those in Berkeley focused on education.
Too bad it's gone.
Those are 90s web sites, tiny in comparison to today's animation heavy monsters. Aren't GeoCities sites static anyway? Then why couldn't they just make a tar of everything and hand it over to archive.org?
Yeah, something doesn't add up. If they are low traffic then the cost is negligible and if they are high traffic then they should be able to make money from ads. Basically, whatever the traffic is, putting ads on them should more than cover the cost of the servers.
Apparently that already happened https://gizmodo.com/5676641/al...
I was a real kid of the 90's. I hit my teens on the early part and ended them on the later part. I remember taking early high school webdesign and the cool thing to do was to create your own personal web page. Myspace (Facebook's precursor) wasn't even a thing yet so having your own web space was elite stuff (especially since it had to be entirely coded from scratch) and geocities helped that happened.
It's better now that the internet isn't such an elitist space but a lot of culture I really do miss was lost in it becoming as such. I have very heavy nerd nostalgia for all of those Geocities sites.
I ignore Anonymous Coward posts. If you want to discuss something, that's awesome. Log in.
For a similar experience to Geocities, just visit ANY OTHER Japanese website. They over-invested in cellphones and gaming systems in the late 90's at the cost of the home PC market. The Xennials never became casual computer nerds, so your average Japanese person UNDER 40 is about as computer literate as your average American OVER 40. The ones who aren't are the social outcasts, which is why nerds are still sort of niche/taboo.
The U.S. version of Geocities is archived here. I'm sure some enterprising Japanese person will do the same:
http://www.oocities.org/
.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Come on over to AOL, it's like the Internet and everything more and you can even make your own profile page! Send me your address, I have an extra CD around here somewhere...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Geocities was once a well-known name, Internet-wise. They could have offered a simple CMS interface in addition to raw HTML, and been what Facebook is, or at least what Blogger is (now owned by Google).
Context-sensitive banner ads at the top or bottom could have paid for it because Geocities was already divided by topic categories, simplifying targeted ads, which advertisers love.
But Yahoo purchased it and ruined it like everything else they ruined. Yahoo had their long fingers in almost every category*: search, social media, blogging, self-hosting, email, shopping (Amazon-esque), discussion groups, and others. Then fucked up each and every one. Their train of fuckups is so long, one thinks it may have been intentional: somebody at the top must have been afraid of success.
Yahoo was handed the Golden Keys to the Kingdom on a red pillow, but swallowed them and then shitted out of the back of the jet on the way to The Gate To The Internet.
It's comparable to the record company who turned down the early Beatles because "guitars are falling out of style"; except Yahoo turned down the Beatles, the Who, Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Three Dog Night, and Aretha Franklin.
* or at least early versions of them
Table-ized A.I.
Dang. If it was a complete archive I know I've got a page buried down in there somewhere, but I have no idea what my username was back then :(.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
So the old (not really) joke is all the japanese homepages that littered the japanese sections of the web were usually hyper-niche sites that almost always had a DO NOT COPY or similar engrish comment. Which is kinda relevant in this case because it is an affirmative statement by the content creator/owner (assuming rights didn't transfer to Yahoo Japan).
Japan used to have some strange copyright rules such that even archives of culturally relevant content by the National Library were explicitly forbidden until recently, even for government webpages! That wasn't even some conspiracy to erase past failures either, just a side effect.
So, for the Internet Archive and similar organizations (many typically located in the US), who may be equipped to do a dump, will they even try? The japanese web evolved very differently, with one major web forum (2ch, now 5ch) being the all encompassing proto-social network of sorts (culturally similar to a single site that functioned culturally like the melting pot of slashdot, fark, something awful, and (shudder) AOL). Japanese geocities was the supporting foundation of information to the mega-platform that 2ch was. Though 2ch was usually ephemeral by nature, so aside from saved epic threads, there's not many real archives of the content.
Sooooooo much crapflooding in the comments here. Maybe Faceboot's troll army don't want us to remember the old, free internet. Back when there were lots of interesting sites, rather than the homogeneous corporate garbage "content" they shovel at us today.
I used to have AOL CDs, but then I decided I needed a new gaming chair https://makezine.com/2006/03/1...
The entire thing is available as a torrent. You can download it all and then grep through it to find your site.
I got happy for a minute.
There were pretty good babylon 5 reviews on http://www.geocities.com/jenof.... But it doesn't look like his made the archive cut.
His Buffy and Angel reviews are pretty good. I remember checking each day after a new episode to see if his review was up.
http://www3.sympatico.ca/
ME TOO!
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
My website is still there, however when I heard Geocities was closing, I went in and erased all of the pictures. (I don't like leaving personal info behind.) Now it's just plain text and broken links.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall