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Geocities is closing up shop


The NZA

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oh noes, there goes 1998

 

GeoCities, once the Internet's third most visited domain, will be shutting down on Oct. 26, taking with it thousands of user home pages and decades of data. All that information will be history.... Fortunately, some historians are making sure it's not lost to the annals of time.

 

Founded in 1994 as Beverly Hills Internet, what is now Yahoo GeoCities was one of the first services to offer an easy way for early Internet surfers to publish their own Web pages. Whereas most hosting options of the 1990s were expensive, thus limiting their use to more entrepreneurial pursuits, GeoCities' free hosting space became the home for thousands of sites built around thematically oriented "neighborhoods": conservation, fashion, military, sports, finance, travel, and more.

 

But that hierarchy proved limiting and then confusing, as neighborhoods expanded into blocks and suburbs. After a Yahoo buyout in 1999, the new management chose to make the URL structure even more complex. This era was quickly followed by both the dot-com bubble burst and the availability of affordable personal hosting, such as Yahoo's own Web hosting. Neither bode well for GeoCities' long-term viability.

 

In April 2009, Yahoo announced that GeoCities would cease accepting new registrations in preparation of the service's closing. In June, they clarified: the service would shut down on Oct. 26, 2009. As their FAQ states, GeoCities is not being decommissioned — it's being deleted. That means any data not personally backed up by its owners or readers will not be recoverable, ever.

 

The shuttering of GeoCities has both historical and contemporary importance. In the latter category, GeoCities is currently the 195th most browsed domain, and a highly referenced one, with two million incoming links — a popularity most other hosts could only dream of. More important, GeoCities (which popularized the notion of webrings) currently serves as a vast archive of information. Digital archivist Jason Scott eloquently explained:

 

... for hundreds of thousands of people, this was their first website. This was where you went to get the chance to publish your ideas to the largest audience you might ever have dreamed of having. 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 color. Right now.

 

Scott and his Archive Team are working to rescue GeoCities by downloading as much of its content as possible — which they estimate to be around ten terabytes. These historians recognize GeoCities as having played a critical role in the development of the Internet. Rather than protesting Yahoo's financially motivated decision, doing fundraising to "Save GeoCities!", or signing online petitions, these data hoarders have taken an active role not in preventing the inevitable but in mitigating its damage by preserving GeoCities in a format protected from further corporate terminations.

 

Our modern sensibilities may not see the value in dancing hamsters (yes, GeoCities originated that, too), but even that Internet meme has become a part of our online culture whose roots will soon be deleted. Scott sees value in recording such data:

 

Already, little gems have shown up in the roughly 8000+ sites I've archived. Guitar tab archives. MP3s that surely took the owners hours to rip and generate. GIF files, untouched for 13 years. Fan fiction. Photographs and websites of people long dead. All stuff that, I think, down the line, will have meaning. It's not for me to judge. It's for me to collect.

 

Scott is the proprietor of TEXTFILES.COM and producer of the excellent BBS: The Documentary. Based on that track record, if he says something is worth holding onto, chances are there's something to it. Even if we can't see that value now, if not for the Archive Team, we may never have another chance to discover it.

 

R.I.P. web 1.0. where will you people go to learn how to draw DBZ?!

....i just know like 3 of you have small sites hosted here you've forgotten about.

 

ps are angelfire and tripod still around?

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Ha i had a site on GeoCities back in the day. Can't remember what was on it or what it was called. Hopefully these guys rescue my page. Most likely it was a collection of prestige writings on South Park season 1, why deep space nine ruled and how much I loved Green Day and Limp Bizkit.

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Even if most of it is junk, there's likely to be some gems there.

 

And you know, a cross-section of all the dogs in the world might show that many have eaten valuable things, but I'm still not going to go digging through a mountain of their shit to find it.

 

Seriously, if you have an awesome website and you're going through Geocities, then you deserve to have your page wiped off the face of the internet.

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Seriously, if you have an awesome website and you're going through Geocities, then you deserve to have your page wiped off the face of the internet.

 

You're a young man, so you don't remember this the way Nick and I do. Geocities was the first affordable way for people to make their own websites. If you had an awesome non-commercial website in 1996, you didn't choose GeoCities. It was the only real option. Not just was it free, but there weren't any real affordable places to host anything. It was all priced for a business-model. So if you literally had the best website in the world in 1996 that didn't make hundreds of dollars a month (or thousands if it became popular, as these hosting services charged by traffic to the site) to blow a page that didn't make money, GeoCities was where you had to go.

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You're a young man, so you don't remember this the way Nick and I do. Geocities was the first affordable way for people to make their own websites. If you had an awesome non-commercial website in 1996, you didn't choose GeoCities. It was the only real option. Not just was it free, but there weren't any real affordable places to host anything. It was all priced for a business-model. So if you literally had the best website in the world in 1996 that didn't make hundreds of dollars a month (or thousands if it became popular, as these hosting services charged by traffic to the site) to blow a page that didn't make money, GeoCities was where you had to go.

 

Yes yes, and you had to walk 13 miles to school in the snow uphill both ways. :wolvy: The point is, Geocities hasn't been worth a shit for nigh-upon 5 years now. If you haven't moved your shit to a better service at this point and insist clinging onto that piece of shit fossil of a web server. You deserve it.

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Oh dear god! All those avatars I had on that page i don't even remember the URL to, what will i ever do??

the only site worth saving is this one,

 

 

http://members.aol.com/brandnew2u/adent.html

 

 

which is now gone and wasn't even a geocities website which just goes to show just how much we'll be missing. but yes, the memories...

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Wow really!!! I kinda thought it was dead a long time ago. It's kinda like hearing about a recent celebrity's death when you thought that person died a long time ago. You're like "They died yesterday??? I thought they died years ago!"

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Funny how geocities really reflects our personalities, my site which lasted from 1998 until 2000 was a place for me to host my thousands of flight simulator 1998 edition aircraft and airport files, people could come over and download rare aircraft and stuff off my page or entire fleets for several airlines, or airports missing for that edition that i had found online myself...

 

it was never very popular though, i had like 35-40 downloads a month.

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