GeoCities

They Still No Longer Make You?

Remember GeoCities, the cumbersome DIY website platform, proto-networking website from the 90s?  The one where we tested our nascent HTML skills and tried to figure out what to say to the big wide Internet? 

And how long after most of us moved on to big, brighter sleeker technologies and modalities (CSS), Yahoo! purchased GeoCities, and a passel of loyalists continued to tool around with their homestead accounts?

Earlier this year, TechCrunch described GeoCities as:

One of the pioneers of web-hosting sites, GeoCities gave users personal publishing tools and created “neighborhoods” within its web platform for users to be able to create pages, add a picture, text, a guest book and a website counter. Long before MySpace, Geocities was known as a place where teenagers, college students, and eventually others could impose their own garish taste upon the rest of the world.

And then, on October 27th, Yahoo! quietly pulled the plug, erasing an entire World Wide Web Universe. 

Or so we would think.  As it turns out, a small dedicated group of Internet archivists are working feverishly to preserve what Time Magazine describes as "people's personal home pages, which were pulled offline with no backup and no permanent record of those users' frenetic early forays online."

While GeoCities failed to churn revenue for Yahoo!, groups such as ArchiveTeam view GeoCities as "the largest self-created folk-art collection in the history of the world."

Until a couple of weeks ago, our web searches still held the possibility of ending up at a website hosted by GeoCities. 

And whether we groaned over loading a site containing bandwidth eating solipsism, reminders of our own cringe inducing first websites, and  "that guy from webpages that suck better get over here quick;" or delighted in stumbling upon authentic outsider digital art-- we all proclaimed:

GeoCities, they still make you?

Comments

[Jeff McMahon]

Remember eWorld?

http://www.scottconverse.com/apple's_eworld.htm

[Jenn]

You know, I don't. Although it does make sense that Apple would try to create something like that in the 90s. If you see anyone using any Apple innovations from the pre-iPod era, send them to me.