I would be remiss if I didn’t make mention of the fact that Yahoo pulled the plug on GeoCities today. If you are wondering what GeoCities was, my best guess is that you weren’t around in the 90’s. Before social networks were all over the place, and before there were even web development firms and hosting companies all over the web, there was GeoCities…
GeoCities existed as a place where you could go on and host your free website, of course they were covered up with advertising that you had no control over, but it was a free website nonetheless. One of my fondest memories of GeoCities was all of the animated gif files that seemed to be synonymous with every page, and if you saw one that you didn’t have on your page, you became instantly obsessed with stealing it and calling it your own before any of your friends beat you to it.
I can remember having one of the guys that helped out with my computer business set me up a GeoCities page for the business somewhere around 1996 or so, it was extremely new at the time. Of course, as business websites go today, this was not what you would call a “business website” but to us, it was awesome!!! I think we even registered a domain name from Network Solutions (they were the only game in town at the time too) and we pointed it to our page to make us look even more professional. I wish there was some kind of way to go back in and time and see that page and see just how far we have come, it would be like the first chapter in a history book.
I can also remember having my own personal GeoCities page which would lay the foundation for the website you are on right now. I can also recall meeting some pretty intuitive pioneers online back in the day that were using GeoCities for everything from sharing their hobbies to pornography, the web was wide open back in the day, a lot less restricted than today in a lot of ways!
Sadly enough, I don’t think that GeoCities ever had a business model that would have worked, and probably the only people that ever actually made any money off of the project was probably the group that sold it to Yahoo back in the day. Once Yahoo took over the project I don’t think they ever did anything with it either in terms of making any money. I know that hindsight is 20/20 but had they had the vision of social networking before anyone else, this might be a completely different world we live in. There was a time when Yahoo was king, I can remember the first time that I ever heard of Google, most people didn’t have a clue what it was, there was also Lycos, Excite, and AltaVista, DogPile came along later as well. It’s a shame that they weren’t able to keep this running but I am not too sad about it all. There comes a time where sometimes things have to go away to focus on new and more viable products, and I guess in the end this is what happened with GeoCities.
Just for old time sakes, here are some of the funny animated gifs from back in the day…
What are some of you favorite memories of GeoCities?
Ah, GeoCities. I remember creating my own GeoCities webpage, and I thought it was *really* cool. My friends and I had some great animated GIFs too. We all spent a lot of time writing comments in each others' “guestbooks”. Looking back, we used it really similar to the way that we use facebook now.
Oh wow, I had forgotten about the Guestbook features, LOL. The best part of those were that instead of just people you know that could post comments, just any weirdo could drop in and leave you notes on your site for you to approve, good stuff. haha.