Salute and farewell, Geocities, R.I.P.
Today, Yahoo! will keep it’s promise of a year ago to close down Geocities for good, thus depriving the internet of a rich and diverse portion of its past.
Imagine the time before blogs (like this one). Before your online journals, Myspaces, Facebooks, Twitters, and RSS feeds. Before fancy things like CSS and Flash. The internet was young, wild, and relatively unpopulated by today’s standards. There was a large chunk of the internet, and I mean that literally, that existed in something called “Geocities”. Geocities was the belief that for free along with the placement of a small advertisement, everyone deserved a presence on the internet to dictate how they saw fit.
Most remember Geocities for it’s primitive MIDI files and animated .GIF “Under Construction” signs, gaudy backgrounds and low-res photographs. Many remember it as being the place where many of today’s popular webcomics got their start.
But I remember it for something else: This is where the first widely available “online journals” or “online diaries”, as they were called before the title of Web log, popped up. This where I, personally, struck out with a “Teach yourself HTML 3.0″ book and created my first “blog”: A primitive thing that I had to update manually by editing index.html in a text editor. Where, admittedly, as a 12-year-old boy, I was less prone to write with any journalistic integrity and more than liable to post an exhaustive compendium of Aliens Vs. Predator fan fiction, most of which I wrote myself. The other half of my website was dedicated to pictures of military vehicles just lookin’ cool.
While I would not have won any design awards, I was able to put myself out there, for better or for worse and let the entire world see what I had to say- and comment on my message board to tell me that my site sucked.
Many people took this opportunity for much more noble goals- uploading historical documents, posting genealogies, hosting images to share with family members across the world (this was before you could e-mail photos for free). The sky was the limit and as Geocities reached the zenith of its popularity by 1999, it had the lion’s share of the user-created portion of the internet. Search engines indexed it regularly, and punching anything into a search engine always brought up a few personal Geocities sites.
Geocities, as such, was an integral part of the internet, it gave power to the people, and gave anyone with the free time a voice to any end. It created virtual “neighborhoods” where sites had actual “neighbors” listed in directories, and created a sense of community on the internet. A sense that has been lost in today’s fast-paced and impersonal internet, which is a far cry from the humble beginnings of geeks connecting online.
While I quit using Geocities long ago as it cleared out slowly, much as the modern Myspace is, for greener pastures, I will always remember how it gave me my start on the internet and gave me a place- a place that has been replicated in many sites since then, but has never been quite the same, never quite so personal- Farewell. I hope you shall always be remembered somewhere on the internet, in the culturally irrelevant category, right next to the Myspace’s and BBS’s of yore. With you dies an archive, a veritable treasure trove, of diaries, commentary, and cataloguing of current events, a perfect snapshot into the period between 1995 and 2000- the sort of thorough and wide-ranging information storehouse that historians could only dream of. Imagine if you had thousands of peoples personal information packets on any subject from the family pet to the biggest political events from ancient Egyptian or Roman times. Imagine how integral Geocities would be to illustrating the 1990s to historians a thousand years from now. Of course, now, it’s a moot point.
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