Comments on: Now closing: GeoCities, a relic of Web's early days

Yahoo's closure of its personal home page service comes as no surprise. Today, Internet self-expression is all about blogs and social networks.

[JJ609]

That's too bad. Now the only old-timer left is Delphi with their forums.

[Orion Blastar]

So much for my free Geocities web site. There were a lot of Geocities web sites that hosted Free and Open Source Software. I guess they will be gone as well. Yahoo really did advertise a lot on Geocities, so I thought they made money on each click. But I guess that was not true?

At Jimdo we just set up a page for people who wanted to move over the GeoCities sites:

http://jimdo.com/geocities

Sign up there and we'll keep you posted about what we're working on to smooth the transition process.

[JCPayne]

One more win for Google!!!!

http://sites.google.com/

[Shhaz]

Thanks for the heads about Google having Sites function. That's where my Geo Cities sites will move.

[josephdunphy]

Shhaz writes:

"That's where my Geo Cities sites will move."

No, that's where they will not. Googlesites does not support .html uploads. However, there are a large number of other possible hosts. Here are a few:

Webng.com
1hwy.com
webs.com
atspace.com
eSmartStart.com
Websamba.com
Freewebtown.com
000webhost.com
Freewebsites.com
Hostrator.com

All of these allow .html uploads, and reasonably close to full control over the design of one's page. (One doesn't get to suppress ads).

Googlesites and Yola? Is the author serious? I know that the first has forced template usage on every page. The second is designed for first time users who don't know HTML, the basics of which can be aquired by anybody with ease in much less than a single afternoon. It's as if he were writing an article about the different varieties of bicycles one might purchase, and declined to mention even one that one could buy without having any training wheels attached.

[bjmd]

Tried Jimdo, it moved my images, but not the background image, changed my one of my subpages to my top index page, and won't let me edit the pages, just save them as they currently are. A massive fail...

Actually it would be a fine service for a different use -- it would replace what I have on Pagii just fine, and I may eventually move my Pagii pages there as Pagii has gone downhill recently, but for hosting a custom homepage written in HTML or CSS, it won't work. It isn't set up to do that. No writing your own code here...

I deleted my Jimdo account within about 20 minutes of making it. Totally won't work for my purposes, and I found their "just migrate your page" very misleading.

Still looking for a new free host for my tiny spot on the web.

[aka_tripleB]

I remember making a site on GeoCities about 10 years ago. I even had the obscure address memorized for awhile. Unfortunately, I also quickly forgot the address and my user name and password so I haven't been back to GeoCities in about 10 years.

[Beatnyama]

This is the funniest comment i've ever read on Cnet. Its a wonder you still remember that you had an account 10 years ago!!

[paul.saulnier]

GeoCities was an interesting, unique service, but Yahoo killed it. When you strangle a service like this with lousy hourly transfer limits and pervasive advertising, it's no surprise that users will want to go elsewhere.

Yahoo itself is a dinosaur. If they would've kept doing search properly, Google would've never emerged as a strong competitor.

[nSeika]

It's sad seeing those websites go away. But even before social networks like Friendster, the time when blogs starts to emerge, amateur websites dedicated to specific interest looks waning already.
Rather than do researches on a topic and doing site structures, they prefer to go with the simpler line of blogging instead.

Most sites now that still looks like the old times are probably corporate's internet presence sites.

[Vegaman_Dan]

I never had a GeoCities site... I always had a privately hosted site even in the beginning. I almost feel that I've missed out on the opportunity for nostalgia. Heh.

Off into the sunset GeoCities goes to join previous travelers such as Prodigy, GEnie, and even Netcom (is netcom even still around?)

[ReVeLaTeD]

Don't forget Spree.com (my personal favorite), Hypermart.net and VirtualAve.net (best domains).

Geocities was at its best when it was a small community-like deal, with neighborhoods and streets and whatnot, where the CEO would post messages on the site. It was like a web version of eWorld (remember that???). When Yahoo bought it, it went straight downhill.

[JCPayne]

Prodigy is on Yahoo... http://www.att.yahoo.com/

Didn't Netcom end up going to Flashcom or Earthlink or one of those companies?

[tikoro]

I personally hold geocities (among others) responsible for killing the web. Giving "everyone" the power to create something is a double-edged sword. They can express themselves, great, yay. They can also blind people with horrid layout schemes and ruin the web that was created by a whole bunch of people that took the time to learn the art of creating a website. Of course MySpace never learned from history that this occurs, nor did the thousands of websites that still offer easy to create MySpace themes which if just using the default are for the most part, at least readable. But give them that freedom to choose? The masses will slaughter it time and time again.

Geocities had a good intention, but poor implementation, and after no focus on keeping it current with the times, I'm surprised it's taken them this long to bring it down. Actually until this article I had no idea it was still in existence. I thought surely they had used their 360 software as heir to the throne, so to speak.

[brightstarbeing]

The funny thing is they are preparing to kill 360 now! HAHA! So no, 360 is not Geocities' heir.

[selfkill]

I built my first website on GeoCities almost 10 years ago. It's too bad they're shutting down such a legacy. I personally think it would make more sense to keep it up at least for historic purposes and still collect ad revenue on it.

[ZetaZeta_]

Kind of like how Google is no longer offering googlepages, yet I can still use it since I already made an account.
Just let it stay for existing users.

[Riquez-001]

With GeoCities & Anglefire you had to make your own html pages, with a little help of course, and upload the pages & graphics using ftp. The results were often mismatched, gaudy & difficult to read - it was a kind of make shift shanty town of websites.

Interestingly, myspace has invested millions in providing the modern day equivalent. The result? A collection of mismatched, gaudy & difficult to read websites.

To be honest I think the old GeoCities sites were better than 90% of myspace sites. It's actually quite visually & audibly offensive when visiting someones myspace. I liken the "myspace experience" to going home with a tramp to his cardboard shelter down by the railway tracks & admiring his garden of dead dogs.

We'd all be better off if they just wiped the myspace servers clean & gave all the users some html training, ftp software, some clean clothes & a hot bowl of soup.

[maya-gaia]

Not to mention the rampant plagerism of content and images in myspace (which does respond to copyright infringement complaints) but blogger in particular hardly ever rectifies.

The fact that may startle those making condescending commentary about Geocities websites is that Google consistently ranks my free geocities.com/maya-gaia website in the first page out of a total sometimes as high as 2M hits of hundreds of esoteric terms- way ahead of blogger or wordpress. My angelfire.com/real-gaia also gets fair ranking. I'll sadly feel the pain when Geocities finally goes down as I was there in 1997 before Yahoo aquired it.

[JCPayne]

Had... Angelfire... And there was Tripod.... Those two ended up getting swallowed by Lycos and that Spanish company Terra. I think Lycos was spit back out though.

[giniko]

I agree with you regarding myspace.

I think web site is much more than just a blog with links to youtube and other sites. usually you are not getting FTP services, can't use any site for backup purposes.

I think all geocities current users (and home.aol.com users too) will enjoy http://www.freewebtown.com service. Simple and has very rich functionality. Unlike social networking sites which are based on legitimate spam, this site is just serves the customers.

[smileyfreak1981]

Don't worry, kiddies, you still have Angelfire.

[JCPayne]

Hmmm Tripod is still there too.
http://www.tripod.lycos.com/

[maya-gaia]

Less than two weeks ago I moved over 100 pages from geocities over to angelfire and used the following "meta refresh" to replace ALL the original html source code on each page::

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=312316da97bc712a&hl=en

It took Google less than a week to start reindexing pages from geocities to angelfire and am getting 2-3 times better ranking in Google search now than previously. Also Google is presenting second-tier indexing to "more angelfire" like they did for geocities which I assume will be more frequent if more webpages relocate to angelfire and raise its Alexa ranking.

[JoeF2]

This is a good thing.
Pretty much the only thing that GeoCities was used for in the last couple years was pages for spammers and scam artists.

[JamesEitz]

RIP GeoCities.

I still remember working for hours to get a rotating picture marquee working. Ahh the 90s what a great time!

[BtmnHatesRbn]

When I ran a brief dot-com in 1998/1999, I used all the free sites and heavily page-linking and FTP transfers to keep the hosting free for this particular company that I'm not allowed to name. When sites like Zoom and Excite went under, so did their webpages. LOL.

Still, yeah, there's a good number of extremely small websites that are hosted by GeoCities. Now those are gone, and that's stupid on Yahoo!'s part. I don't think leaving a few servers on in a dark corner would've killed anybody.

[zenwaves]

my first website is still up there!
http://www.geocities.com/Vienna/6303/index.html

[ericjamescarl]

It's disappointing to see so many sites disappear from the internet, only because I see them as representations of a very specific era of the internet. I definitely have nostalgic memories of the time I spent building sites on GeoCities. It was largely responsible for me learning HTML and getting into web design as a career.

Yes, the majority of sites on GeoCities were terrible to look at but that's definitely part of the charm - normal people using whatever tools were available to reach an audience, join a community or just share their interests. They were labors of love. Especially to see them now, years past without updates, ghost towns of websites long forgotten by their creators, is in itself an interesting internet archive.

GeoCities, you will be missed. :(

[ericjamescarl]

Ah yes, and one of my old sites on GeoCities still: http://www.geocities.com/timessquare/stadium/8200/

[codynews]

Yeah, my first websites were built using notepad, opening the file in netscape, and hitting "refresh" to see what my HTML changes did.

So when are they going to just shut down all of yahoo. Talk about a relic...

Cody

[mach612]

I built my site when Geocities was still called Beverly Hills Internet.

It seemed pretty slick at the time for someone in a small town in the South to have a site hosted in far away Beverly Hills. :)

Tripod.com is another good free Web hosting site, and it's still there, though now part of Lycos. (Which makes me think it might not be there for long.)

I still have and use a free Tripod.com key chain/bottle opener I got as a promotional item from them.

Before Yahoo! bought Geocities, there was an uproar about a watermark that was floating on the bottom right hand corner of the page, instead of the GeoGuide bar they had at the top of each page, like most sites, at the time. It was to be a different way to present ads. While it was cool tech at the time, many Geocities users went absolutely insane, and I was included at the time (a mere high school student).

People really cared about the service back then, and fought for changes to the watermark when it first came out (and later, TOS changes from Yahoo! during the Geocities integration), but when Yahoo! started doing that big white slider with all the ads, that's when you knew the service wasn't going to last. But honestly, Yahoo! just continued the path Geocities started, and I think the user exodus began before Yahoo's time.

One of the leaders behind the anti-watermark movement, who ID'd himself as AlterIcon, was a great guy, and we still chat occasionally... the remnants of his site are even still online today, although not for long:

http://www.geocities.com/PicketFence/1284/oldindex.htm

I am saddened for the service going away, as it served its purpose for the time, but glad for the friends I made from it.

[geoman2009]

Does anyone remember when geocities increased the disk space on everyone's account from one meg to two megs?

[JCPayne]

Looks like Microsoft will get their search only-deal after all.....

The Yahoo CEO seems prepared to kill off everything other than search and then turn over babelfish, altavista, overture and all the rest over to Microsoft in the end.