GeoCities closes forever

[medicnick83]

Once the third most visited domain on the Internet, the now ailing GeoCities will shut down permanently on October 26.

GeoCities was founded in 1994 and was one of the first services offering an easy to use interface, which allowed 'mum and dad' users to publish their own websites easily.

GeoCities was considered revolutionary for its time, being one of the first free hosting services on the internet and one of the first to sort domains via their topic, e.g. finance, travel or fashion.

Unfortunately, as the popularity of GeoCities took off the topics available for hosting became many, and the site increased in complexity. The purchase of GeoCities by Yahoo in 1999 only served to make this growing problem even greater. As the dot-bomb of the early noughties took hold, and personal web hosting became affordable, the writing was on the wall for the future of the business.

By April 2009, Yahoo ceased accepting new registrations for the GeoCities service. In June, the company announced that the service would finally be closed in October this year. That day has come.

Digital archiver, Jason Scott has been working tirelessly to backup as much of the service's content as possible before its closure, which is estimated to be around 10 Terabytes of data.

In reminiscing of the service, Scott said, "...for hundreds of people, this was their first website...Your pet subject or conspiracy theory or collection of writings left the safe confines of your Windows 3.1 box and became something you could walk up to any internet-connected user, hand them the URL, and know they would be able to see your stuff. In full colour. Right now."

A golden milestone in Internet history, now gone forever.

I had my first ever web site on GeoCities, and if I remember correctly, it was a "warez" site, and then I opened another account and it was a "desktop wallpapers" site... wow! brings back memories.

Gone but not forgotten eh!

 

[Freshy-ZN]

Yeah. Served its purpose and probably largely responsible for the popularity of the web. But time to move on I suppose.

 

[Kloofvreter]

 

[zageek]

My first ever site was also hosted on geocities. The good old days when the only webdevelopment tools were a library book on HTML and notebad.

It must have been around 1998. I used to go into Cape Town after school and walk all the way to Incredible Connection on the foreshore by Culemborg ( there is a Hyundai there now). Right at the back of the store was a coffee shop and and whole bunch of free internet terminals.

From there I used to surf for hours on end and that's where I used to setup my first Geocities account. Oh the memories...

 

[Lazy]

My first site was also on Geocities and was just a bunch of garbage. Must have been around 1995/1996 somewhere. It was just links to CD covers and photos. Mostly Metallica ones

 

[wrathex]

You can still find the old sites in the internet archive. (if you know the addie)

Agreed zageek, those were heady days. (sound of screeching dial-up, eating tcp/ip for breakfast)

 

[theratman]

I remember geocities well,wonder if angelfire is still around.