Geocities To Close

[engine]

Geocities To Close [help.yahoo.com]

We have decided to discontinue the process of allowing new customers to sign up for GeoCities accounts as we focus on helping our customers explore and build new relationships online in other ways. We will be closing GeoCities later this year.

[LifeinAsia]

It was still around?!?

[g1smd]

Wow. That's some of the oldest content on the web.

There's a lot of junk there, but there's a number of nuggets of history that may well be lost forever.

[brotherhood of LAN]

oldest content

Indeed. Some of the 'quality pages' of the mid-nineties web still sit on there.

I wonder how many link requests they've had since then....

[Slinger]

I just put a new site up on Geocities in the last 6 months. It still works good...and it's still free.

[gethan]

A little bit of web history slides into the depths... will internet archiver have copies of it?

[BillyS]

Geocities was a great concept and a lot of good content appeared on those pages. Unfortunately, as we monetized the web, spam took hold. I would imagine Geocities is a nightmare to maintain.

[wtkad]

Like many other people I know, my first website was on Geocities. I learned HTML along the way by trying things out there - the WYSIWYG and fill-in-the-blank editors were too limiting, so the challenge of the "advanced" editor (a big empty text box) was what inspired me to start learning.

Sometime after I signed up, they doubled the space you were allowed to TWO megabytes. I remember wondering how anyone would ever use that much space.

[grelmar]

Sometime after I signed up, they doubled the space you were allowed to TWO megabytes. I remember wondering how anyone would ever use that much space.

I did pretty quick. Geocities taught me that often less is more. Rather than throw every applet and image you could at a site, you had to really define what you wanted to do. A valuable lesson that many websites need to learn (Hey! Yahoo should learn that and CLEAN UP AND MINIMALIZE THEIR OWN HOME PAGE).

geocities... tripod... what other dead accounts should I go looking for?

hmmm...

[ytswy]

Wonderful quote in a BBC story [news.bbc.co.uk] from Rupert Goodwins, editor of the ZDNet website:

I think GeoCities was the first proof that you could have something really popular and still not make any money on the internet.

Also says Yahoo paid $3.57bn for Geocities at the height of the dot com boom. Ouch!

[grandpa]

I thought it had already been closed to new accounts. That was where I put my first web site, it's still up and running and luring unsuspecting surfers.

[Vishal]

Also says Yahoo paid $3.57bn for Geocities at the height of the dot com boom. Ouch!

I thought WebShots and few others were a way bigger 'ouch'.

Geocitis
My friend at university recommended Tripod to me, but for some reason I had one of my first website on Geocities. Just the name brings up lots of memories about making blunders in learning and staying up all night correcting mistakes and competing with friends. Its an old relic with tons of info, and don't think it should really be shut down.

We 'try' to protect antiques in physical world - hopefully this notion of protection will also extend to online work. Or is web only used for making money by most people?

[edited by: Vishal at 1:28 pm (utc) on April 24, 2009]

[woop01]

They weren't using it to make enough money. That's why it's gone.

[johnnie]

At least we still have fortunecity and tripod :D

[Jack_Hughes]

Bet it gets scraped to death over the next few months... nice unique content that can be dumped on some spare domains and then adsensed... easy money. I bet a lot of the content is never transferred elsewhere.

[MrSpeed]

Someone(Google) will step in and snatch it up. I have a few quality geocities sites that make a steady stream of income with adsense.

[webdoctor]

According to my DMOZ RDF dump, over 82000 unique Geocities URIs are currently listed in the Open Directory Project [dmoz.org]

I'm guessing that's not worth $3.57bn - but how much would you pay for the domain geocities.com? :-)

[Israel]

As a first step toward an Information Technology degree back in the early days, I had to take a very b-o-r-i-n-g entry level www class ("Now we are going to add a favorite....").

To pass the time, I created a site in the long-gone FreeYellow with hard-coded HTML.

The next semester we were assigned to set up and maintain a GeoCities site.

Those were fun days! The future seemed exciting -- and it is!

Israel

[creative craig]

I still have a site running on Geocities, shame to see it go!

[LifeinAsia]

I bet a lot of the content is never transferred elsewhere.

I agree, and it's a real shame. I know of at least 2 sites there where the owners have passed away. That was many years ago, so I'm sure many more have gone the same way. Luckily, both of them gave us permission to use the images on their sites (personal pictures they took during the Korean War) before they passed away.

[Kufu]

This is a much bigger deal that this thread would let one to believe. Not only does Geocities contain some of the oldest content, but that very content houses some of the oldest links on the web.

This could have huge ranking consequences for sites that have a strong link profile due to Geocities links.

Or am I way off?

[nealrodriguez]

Yahoo bought GeoCities for $3.57bn at the height of the dotcom boom in 1999.

i wonder about which web 2.0 triple they'll be writing the same thing about when finally having decided to remain undecided; on monetization that is.

[Shaddows]

This could have huge ranking consequences for sites that have a strong link profile due to Geocities links.

Now I think about it...

You could see fundamental shifts in ranking patterns as vintage links die, unleashing unpredictable downstream effects. Trust and Authority will be affected, venerable sites (or pages thereof) might see large portions of their inbound value wiped off, with 2nd, 3rd and Nth generation iterative revisions to WebSpace.

Good call Kufu, good call.

[LifeinAsia]

I'm not sure how much link juice Geocities links have. But it certainly could have an effect on some sites.

[super70s]

I started out with GeoCities in 1996, then upgraded to Yahoo Small Business in 2001. This thread made me curious if my old GeoCities aliases still worked.

http://www.geocities.com/[i](my Yahoo login name)[/i]/

seems to resolve to the correct URL, but

http://www.geocities.com/SunsetStrip/[i](my 4 digit code)[/i]/

gets a 404.

[edited by: encyclo at 11:59 pm (utc) on April 24, 2009]
[edit reason] delinked example URLs [/edit]

[wyweb]

..my first website was on Geocities...

So was mine. In fact I learned HTML from using the geocities drag and drop page builder and then copying the source code to my PC. Not really recommended as a learning tool.. in later years I would have to unlearn a lot of things I mistakenly thought were fundamental coding truths but it did give me a chance to dig into the code, learn tags and understand their relationships to what was seen on the page, etc...

The passing of an era...

[JonSimmonds]

As for others my first website was on geocities, just a simple "hello world" thing, later on I went on to make focused sites on PC gaming.

How the times have changed, still remember the "this site used tables please wait while it loads messages!"

Shame to see it go on nostalgic terms, but I guess it is a bit past its time now

[JS_Harris]

Wow, I made a site on geocities many many years ago. That's too bad.

[londrum]

Shame to see it go on nostalgic terms, but I guess it is a bit past its time now

you could say that about old people

[Crush]

heh, was only good for spam in the end.

[edited by: Crush at 9:17 pm (utc) on April 24, 2009]