Today is the end of an era. Or rather, the era ended a long time ago, but like the AWB and Redsox fans, one community refused to let the dream die.
Mashable had a story yesterday announcing the shutdown of Geocities, which if you were a user you had plenty of warning about. However, today is the final day before Yahoo, who currently owns it, pulls the plug.
Why should we care? Because Geocities was “where many an internet nerd cut his teeth” – it was free to create a page, and easy to manage. At the age of thirteen I myself had two simple HTML pages up there, and have progressed marginally in my web design ability since then.
What was important about Geocities was that it was one of the first truly popular stirrings of the “social web” – the idea that users of the internet could influence what other users saw, by creating their own pages or leaving comments on others, creating web rings with their friends, etc. (I know I’m omitting usenet and all sorts of old-school, my apologies). It all sounds super gay in retrospect, but at the time something important was happening.
Geocities was purchased at the height of dot com sillyness for a whopping $3.65 billion, but at its closure is worth effectively nothing. On paper. In reality Geocities is a treasure-trove of internet history, with the largest collection of “Under Construction” signs to be found outside of central Gauteng. Fortunately, some good people have the foresight to preserve what will essentially be an important part of this generation’s culture. A team is currently working hard to archive as many pages as possible.
To commemorate this rather sad occasion, xkcd.com has done a special edition redesign of its page, and the readers of mashable have left some touching memories as comments if anyone wants to get nostalgic about it.
RIP Geocities
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No thanks – I already have enough degrees. If you’re a spammer, that’s a really poor attempt to post a “relevant” comment on a completely-unrelated blog. If you’re looking for a free paper on the subject, get off your fat ass and write your own you lazy shits.