Geocities Shutting Down Today

Paolo DF writes "Geocities is closing today. Its advent in 1995 was a sign of the rising 'Internet for everyone' era, when connection speeds were 1,000x or 2,000x slower than is common today. You may love it or hate it, but millions of people had their first contact with a Web presence right here. I know that Geocities is something that most Slashdotters will see as a n00b thing — the Internet was fine before Geocities — but nevertheless I think that some credit is due. Heck, there's even a modified xkcd homepage to mark the occasion." Reader commodore64_love notes a few more tributes around the Web. Last spring we discussed Yahoo's announcment that Geocities would be going away.

I suspect for many it was their first foray...

[fprintf]

Much like MySpace and Facebook are the first online foray for young adults & kids now, GeoCities was at one time the first entry point for many of us.

I remember reading a magazine telling all about this new thing called the "World Wide Web", and one of the highlighted links (yes, a magazine printed a list of links) was GeoCities. I was on of the first users at the time and setup my site, www.geocities.com/MotorCity/1108, at the time. In fact, this was my second site since the first I forgot the login for... much like low UIDs, not one valued low geocities addresses back then, and I'm not sure if they ever did.

It was an awesome introduction to HTML and I think served a lot of us very well.

Ah Geocities, farewell

[ZekoMal]

I'm a noob I s'pose; geocities was my entry into the internet. For me, that was how I learned all the HTML codes: I would type in what I thought would look good, check out the end result, then go back and fix it up. Most of the content wasn't that good, but you could find all sorts of little gems with enough searching. Can't even recall how many custom Doom/Heretic levels I found thanks to geocities...

Re:N00b thing?

[Anonymous Coward]

Amen - sure, Geocities lowered the barrier to constructing content (in the sense that you didn't need a shell account or to know how to use one), but you still needed to figure out HTML. You still needed to be a little bit geeky.

The full "social networks" that came after Geocities, those are what lowered the barrier to the degree where it's a "n00b thing."

Re:I suspect for many it was their first foray...

[The Moof]

I'd say more MySpace than Facebook due to MySpace giving you enough control to make visually abusive pages and 'Theme Sites' injecting ads everywhere.

Got to give credit where credit is due...

[sean_nestor]

Say what you want about aesthetics, but Geocities gave a lot of young people (myself included) their first taste of web design. Long before cookie-cutter social networking sites made web coding languages trivial, services like Geocities and Angelfire were giving people all the tools to build a personal web site with. Sure, they weren't all winners [seanbaby.com] (by a long shot [gvsu.edu]), but there were enough diamonds in the rough that I still have a soft spot for the days when a lot of young kids actually bothered to learn HTML and CSS so they could make their page look a little nicer.

We often overlook the idea of using web sites as a form of expression, but that's exactly what a lot of the self-made websites were back then. And I remember seeing a lot of really amazing layouts being made by people who otherwise had no interest in anything techy, a little after CSS hit the mainstream.

Say what you will, but Geocities got a lot of young people - myself included - to get their hands dirty with web design. I, for one, will miss it.

Re:Too bad

[CharlyFoxtrot]

It had some really interesting sites for its day. Like this one [geocities.com] I found just the other day with a chronology of Asimov's Foundation universe and a list of characters not updated in over 10 years. Soon to be lost in the ether or stuck in some archive somewhere I guess.

Loved the old Geocities

[thetoadwarrior]

I first started on some site I can't even remember but it was super basic so I moved to Tripod and then also opened up some stuff on Geocities.

There was a load of shit on Geocities especially after Yahoo bought them but it was also full of tons of useful info. After all that's all some people had to share info and all sites were ugly even if most were but let's face it the web in general is a bit ugly compared to now.

Geocities could at least give people a platform to learn web design and development. You don't get that really with most social sites these days and most people's myspace site is ugly as sin so in some ways we haven't really advanced.

Re:Too bad

[Aladrin]

I don't think there's less unique content. I think there's -more- non-unique content. You're just having trouble finding the unique content because you're traveling in the well-known circles. I still find plenty of things that only return a few results in Google that are actually for what I want.

And the fact that things are repeated isn't bad, either. The other day I wanted to know how to thicken honey. I buy 'spreadable' honey at the store, but I prefer the taste of some other more earthy honeys and want them spreadable. Turns out it's called 'whipped honey' by most people and you actually don't -add- anything to it. Because there are a dozen or so sites about it, 1 of them actually managed to hit enough that my keywords found it. If there had been only 1 site, I probably would still be wondering a year from now.

Re:N00b thing?

[commodore64_love]

I hate using MS-DOS with the Windows overlay.

On a Commodore all you need to do is shove a cartridge in the rear and run an ethernet cable into it. Plug'n'play in 1982 baby! ;-)

Re:Too bad

[smellsofbikes]

I've heard a lot of people make the claim that the Internet is less interesting than it used to be, because there are less people making webpages about peanut-butter-flavored roller skates, but I wonder if that's true. I think it's more an issue of dilution: there are 100x as many people online as there were 10 years ago, and almost all of them are boring mundane people making boring mundane webpages, so the interesting (and, in my judgment, *useful*) pages are just much harder to find. But for all the people who *want* to read about the latest celebrity mishap, the Internet is probably becoming *more* useful. Speaking as someone who has more than my share of weird micro-interest webpages online, and has since 1996, I'm getting consistently increasing traffic and when I do a search on the sort of subjects my pages are about, I find consistently increasing numbers of similar pages, but neither the interest nor the other pages are increasing at anywhere nearly how quickly the Internet as a whole is increasing. I figure we're just getting lost in the noise, which is fine as long as the info is still out there. However, if people have evidence that the little weird quirky pages are actually disappearing, rather than just getting swamped, I'd love to hear about it.

Re:N00b thing?

[Skuld-Chan]

I do remember when geocities came online. I was still using Windows 3.1 (really hadn't played with linux much) and had a shell connection to a Solaris machine run by Oregon EDNET (compass). If you search around google you'll find references to that.

Anyhow I thought it was cool they were basically giving away website space for free. The original version of it wasn't a banner, popup encursted nightmare - those came later, probably when someone who worked there woke up one day and asked themselves how it was going to make money.

For sure - my first website ever was on geocities.

Re:N00b thing?

[Amorpheus_MMS]

I'm sure fourteen years must be close to an Internet Millennium.

Re:check the source.

[Tony Hoyle]

I liked the

<SCRIPT LANGUAGE='SCHEME'>(define (eval exp env) (cond ((self-evaluating? exp) exp) ((variable? exp) (lookup-variable-value exp env)) ((quoted? exp) (text-of-quotation exp)) ((assignment? exp) (eval-assignment exp env)) ((definition? exp) (eval-definition exp env)) ((if? exp) (eval-if exp env)) ((lambda? exp) (make-procedure (lambda-parameters exp) (lambda-body exp) env)) ((begin? exp) (eval-sequence (begin-actions exp) env)) ((cond? exp) (eval (cond->if exp) env)) ((application? exp) (apply (eval (operator exp) env) (list-of-values (operands exp) env))) (else (error "Common Lisp or Netscape Navigator 4.0+ Required" exp))))</SCRIPT>

Re:N00b thing?

[Megaweapon]

"Slashdot? Pfft. It'll never last."

Slashdot of yore didn't last. Slashdot of mindless fanboyism killed it. Now with 30495% more JavaScript as well!

Geocities lead me to my wife

[Christoph]

I got an email from a stranger in the Philippines asking for help with a document she found on my website. I responded (somewhat begrudgingly), she thanked me. I followed a link to her Geocities homepage in her signature line, and (seeing her photos) began emailing her.

http://www.geocities.com/balene46/Photo_Gallery.html [geocities.com]

We've been married four years now.
http://www.cgstock.com/personal/arlene_gregerson [cgstock.com] ...and have a great toddler.
http://www.cgstock.com/athena [cgstock.com]

Thanks, geocities.

Re:Internet Archived; Time to Move On

[commodore64_love]

That's $20 too much. Goodbye CVI Guide to Earth Final Conflict! (yes that was the name of my site - haven't updated it since Y2K)

Its advent in 1995 was a sign of the rising 'Internet for everyone' era, when connection speed were 1,000x or 2,000x slower than is common today.

Hmmm. I had a 14.4k modem in 1995, so my modern connection should be 14,000-28,000 kbit/s today. (looks around). Where is this slashodot? I don't have anything even close to the speed. Mine's only 750 k.

(shrug) Check this out - my website might survive after all: "Yahoo! GeoCities Plus customers: When GeoCities closes, you won't experience any change to your site, and we'll show you how to move your files to Yahoo! Web Hosting automatically, at no extra cost." Hmmmm.

Nah. Let it die.

Re:Geocities lead me to my wife

[cadience]

Similar story, but in reverse. II had a rather beefy Calculus tutorial site on geocities to help me with my work as a tutor. My (now) wife, emailed me to ask several questions, and we started chatting over ICQ. Met in person a few years later, and now have been married for 6 years!

Oh SiliconValley Peaks #3737

[EkriirkE]

I remember picking my neighborhood page, throwing up useless junk about how much macs suck and PC rule, animated GIFs for IChat, ICQ and webring. Then I wrote a program that drew visitors to my page and got me recognition in the weekly geocities digests for my traffic and a couple free tshirts (I still have one in the plastic wrapper, the other I wear as casual). They gave me more webspace and bandwidth as well. Then a year or so later Yahoo bought them up and started doling out vengeance against those who had active sites. This is when GeoCities truly died. All that we saw between then and now was postmortem random nerve firing. Yahoo routinely would shut down my site with tales of "Bandwidth exceeded"

Re:Internet Archived; Time to Move On

[Stupendoussteve]

Obviously you haven't been using the right [wikipedia.org] networks [wikipedia.org].

There are still free web hosts, they're just not as well known or popular.I have long used Multimania [multimania.co.uk] (though under different names) as a file drop.

Re:Internet Archived; Time to Move On

[Beardo the Bearded]

IIRC, I was under the CapeCanaveral directory, number 9799. I haven't even checked it in years.

I used Sizzling HTML Jalfezi and hand-coding to make my Geocities page. When they brought in the WYSIWYG editor, I was still using notepad to edit my pages. Those HTML skills have paid more than one bill and translated very handily to XML.

But that's not all. The skills I learned kludging my way through Geocities (and with Jalfrezi) still get used today. I write a handful of websites for the volunteer organizations I'm with, and more than one employer's website has been upgraded with a few of the things I learned from GC. It was a great sandbox where you could learn the basics of the web framework and HTML coding. Yeah, you couldn't host fark or /. on there, but it let you see how tables worked, what a page of animated GIFs looked like, and how to insert javascript into a website. Hey, I wore teal clothing because it was in style. Don't mock the GIF / MIDI that was the style at the time.

Finally, and this is the best part, it indirectly put me into contact with a woman I'd never met. After a little bit of contact, we went on a date. Long story short, we've been married for eleven years and have two kids.

We joke that the Internet (and I will capitalize it until they give away all my parts) created life.

2000x slower? Try 5 times faster.

[Anonymous Coward]

Its advent in 1995 was a sign of the rising 'Internet for everyone' era, when connection speeds were 1,000x or 2,000x slower than is common today

In 1995 I had a 5Mbps up and 5Mbps down cable connection with a static IP address for $50 per month.

Now to get just 1Mbps up and a static IP address I have to pay $120 per month.

Speeds are much lower now than they were in the glory days like 1995. I don't think it will ever be as good as it was then.