So the inevitable day has finally happened – GeoCities is officially shutting its doors and going offline. This is the same site that was bought by Yahoo back in 1999 for a staggering $3.57 BILLION US dollars and at the time, was home to 1.1 million users. As a modern day comparison, Rupert Murdoch acquired MySpace in July 2005 for $580 million and it came with 120 million users.
Look at this fantastic time-line of its beginnings and its final end.
I owe a lot to GeoCities, I really do. My first pen friend even came as the result of being on GeoCities, I can’t remember her name but she was from Canada and we use to write each other letters – then I think we both ended up getting a life haha. But memories like that never fail to bring a smile to my face. Without the genuine impact GeoCities had on my life, I probably wouldn’t be in my current career.
I learnt so much from that site, from uploading onto the Internet itself (which blew my mind at the time) through to data management, hyper-linking, animated gifs (remember the spinning e-mail envelope?), different file types, blogs, bulletins, forums, avatars all of which seem so commonplace now in the current world of social-networking.
I always found it inherently interesting and appealing, web design mixes logic with creativity, a combination which is often hard to find in the workplace. So it doesn’t really surprise me that I’ve ended up where I am. There’s no doubt in my mind that it was GeoCities that set the wheels in motion.
To give you a brief background to GeoCities, they were the first outlet which allowed you to create your own website without any complex HTML knowledge, your very own Internet webpage. You could custom it to an extent using their WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor and it was all for free, no hosting fees, all ad driven and supported.
Of course the pages were shockingly awful, as it was the first experience many people had ever had with personalizing and populating the Internet. However, it will always be the first avenue where people legitimately had the power to express themselves, in a worldwide community. Check out some worst sites on the net.
I vividly remember sitting in the collage IT department building a GeoCities page for my band. You can see what I was doing aged 16 here (Whilst some of the images are broken, the links still work – it’s an illuminating trip into the mindset of 16 year old wannabe rockstar let me tell you!)
There was a real innocence about it then, a whole new frontier of discovery. Unlike nowadays where people grow up not knowing what it was like BEFORE the Internet existed. That notion really does make me feel old, the reality that I was around before Google haha.
So here’s to you GeoCitiess, for all you’ve done, for everything you allowed us to do, for opening so many doors and most of all for all those memories which have shape how we use the Internet today.
The existence of GeoCities will always go hand in hand with the birth of the Internet for me – I’m sad to see it go.
