GeoCities bites the dust
IT SPAWNED A MILLION homepages during the dotcom boom of the mid-nineties, but alas GeoCities is no more
IT SPAWNED A MILLION homepages during the dotcom boom of the mid-nineties, but alas GeoCities is no more. Owner Yahoo!, who procured the service around a decade ago for just under $4 billion, had announced that the decision had been made to condemn it to the scrap heap earlier this year – and now it is gone forever. Condemned to the history books and the web archive servers, if you managed to notify those hoping to preserve any antique sites for prosperity.
Visitors on October 26th were greeted by the screen shown above, informing them not to bother coming back. Yahoo! maintains the scrappage will allow them to offer more contemporary services more in keeping with rapidly changing customer trends, but many will feel this marks an end of an era.
So is all this nostalgic hankering after a bygone Internet age just a load of old rubbish, or does the passing of such an influential name in the web’s history leave you angry, dewy eyed, or disappointed? Could Yahoo! have done more to revamp and rebrand GeoCities for a modern audience, or have contemporary solutions like WordPress left such services behind?
We’d like to hear your reactions and opinions now, plus any stories of how GeoCities might have influenced your road into web design…
REST IN PEACE
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My first website was made on Geocities in secondary school about 7-8 years ago. Sure it was a load of unstructured randomly placed animated gifs dancing around with a massive “Welcome to my homepage” heading in the middle, but still it opened the door to a whole new world of creativity and a friendly, welcoming community to me. It’s certainly an end of an era in my eyes.
In a fit of creativity back in 2001 I decided to create a small theatre group and used GeoCities for the website. The result was a horrid website with a black background and multicoloured text. There could well have been a banner across the top featuring Comic Sans but perhaps I’m getting carried away with just how awful it was.
Remarkable that only 8 years later you can put together a professional looking website through an online service in LESS time than that piece of crap took me!
I can’t say I’ll miss Geocities now, but I don’t think I’d be into web development or design without it. My interest in having a website was sparked by Geocities and Homestead at the tail end of primary school. I developed a website for my make believe wrestling promotion (I was 11!) and remember being awe stricken when my tacky hit counter increased with every visit. Couple that with some animated flaming text gifs and an empty chat room – my Geocities website was something to behold.
Eventually I got fascinated by the technologies that were behind Geocities and moved forward into learning HTML. So you could say, in a round about way that Geocities dictated my chosen profession from a very early age.
Geocities was the vehicle in which many of us took our first tentative steps into cyberspace. It might have had a lot to do with the blinking star gif animations, but like the first astronauts into space you felt like you were stepping into a brave new world.
Geocities was a great leveller, it didn’t matter if you had no prior html knowledge it gave everyone an ability to mark out a place on the web to call their own. I remember the first time i learnt html i had paragraphs of text scrolling across the screen! There was no real design considerations back then, sites had a more anarchic feel. It was a canvas to get things to work, not necessarily working cohesively together.
ah that is pretty sad, I like a few of you on here started my foray into developing interwebs with geocities (and angelfire and homestead) and it introduced me to the world of html. I remember being in awe that I could make something on my home page and send a link to someone else across the world and they could see the same thing.