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Reocities Strives to Keep the Geocities Memory Alive

Ryan Whitwam — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 19:51:00 -0500

Now that Geocities has been shuttered for good by Yahoo, do you find yourself wanting to have just one more look around? Geocities may have been home to some of the ugliest, most poorly designed sites in existence, but it was special to a lot of people. For many, it was their first foray into the internet – the first real hub of content creation we all shared. If you fall into this category, you’re in luck. You can head on over to Reocities and see a sizable chunk of the once great webhost.

Riocities is a one man project started only six days before the shutdown that aimed to save the Silicon Valley “neighborhood” in Geocities. Riocities owner, Jacques, created a script to rescue Geocities pages by copying them to his personal storage space. He eventually expanded his project to grab as many Geocities neighborhoods as possible. All told, he saved about 600,000 pages from extinction.

All this was done on a 10Mb connection. That’s commitment. There may not be anything really worth saving in Geocities, but now we have the time to find out. So feel free to dive into this world of animated GIFs and MIDI background music at Reocities.

Geocities Finally Shuts the Gates

Bart Salisbury — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 14:26:10 -0500

As we bring in the new, out must go the old. And the old is GeoCities which, with about 15 years of life, the last ten under the benign neglect of Yahoo, has finally been pushed out the door. Today is GeoCities last day, may it rest in peace.

GeoCities seems old school by today’s standards, but at the time of its introduction in late 1994, the ability for individuals to quickly and easily post a web page was visionary. Thousands took advantage of the opportunity to post pictures, poems, tributes, opinions, likes, and dislikes. Created by David Bohnett and John Rezner GeoCities became the place to be on the web.

And like many early Internet ventures it made quite a splash while making little or no money, despite determined efforts to do so. GeoCities did make its founders rich, both when GeoCities went public in 1998, and later when Yahoo, looking to expand its Internet presence, bought GeoCities at the peak of the dot.com bubble for a cool $3.57 billion in Yahoo stock. Yahoo’s heavy-handed management drove away a good number of subscribers, leaving GeoCities bordering on becoming a ghost-town rather than a thriving metropolis, and, for some, marked the beginning of the end of a vibrant experiment in social networking.

In April Yahoo announced plans to close GeoCities down, and stopped accepting new registrations. GeoCities inhabitants were helped to move their web content to their hard drives, and offered the opportunity to move to Yahoo’s pay web hosting service. While all of those web sites, that intimately portrayed the lives of millions of subscribers, are now on their way to the ash heap of history, they won’t much be missed. We’ve still got Facebook, Myspace, Ning and Twitter to keep us occupied.

Image Credit: Yahoo

Yahoo Pulls the Plug on GeoCities

Justin Kerr — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 01:43:22 -0500

If a web 2.0 service goes offline in the middle of the night does it make a sound? Well, if your Yahoo quietly pulling the plug on your free web hosting service, you hope not! As sad as it may be for us nostalgic types, after more than a decade of hosting free community webpages, this once innovative and powerful brand will finally come to a close later this year.

The trademark of the GeoCities service was the neighborhood system which allowed users to assign their page to a specific community of like minded websites. They were also founded during a period when only a handful of developers were publishing content for the web. Neighborhoods such as “Hollywood” and “Silicon Valley” were abandoned shortly after Yahoo took control of the company in 1999. It was purchased at the peek of the dot com bubble for $3.57 billion dollars, and like many other web properties scooped up at this time, it wasn’t worth as much as they’d hoped.

Yahoo is also known for having made several unpopular changes to the service shortly after acquisition which some users blame for its slow downward spiral. One of these changes for example was a modification to the terms of service which allowed Yahoo to lay claim to any content hosted on its service. Many of these decisions were eventually reversed, but with the rapidly falling costs of web hosting, it was only a matter of time before it folded in. Yahoo has stopped accepting new applications, and existing users are being encouraged to upgrade to one of their paid web hosting packages.

Did you ever host a website on Geocities? Share your memories in the comments below.