Those are the words that greeted us when we tried to log in to Geocities today. The now famous web hosting service that ushered in a whole world of websites, some good, most horrible, has shut down. Created by David Bohnett and John Rezner in late 1994, the service became unavailable on October 27, 2009.
The site allowed millions of people to create web pages with no knowledge or interest in HTML or web design sense. Back when the BLINK command was essential, and you could download millions of different colored bars and buttons, using them all on one page. Once host to millions of web pages, competition from other free hosting sites (ex. Angelfire, Tripod) and social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace slowly dwindled market share till it bacame unprofitable.
Rupert Goodwins, editor of the ZDNet website, described GeoCities as “the first proof that you could have something really popular and still not make any money on the internet.”
Sadly, we heard the news too late to save some of our fan sites. Of course, we never looked at them in almost two years, but we would have liked to save them for posterity. If only we’d known about the digital museum http://geocities.ws/ we could have saved it there too. Anyway. There’s speculation that it’s possible the pages are still available if we sign up for Yahoo’s paid web hosting service, but we’re not that interested.
Good bye Geocities. We hardly knew ye.
BONUS LINK: Wired has a splendid recreation of every awful Geocities site. *Sniff* We just need a minute…
UPDATED: Fixed the typo “would have liked to dave them for posterity”. Thanks “TheForce.net” forum. LOL
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<span class="dsq-postid" data-dsqidentifier="43038 ">3 Comments
Well, that's sad. Geocities was pretty cool, based on the idea that everybody could have a website. Of course, it also proved that not everybody should. Frankly, that parody website on Wired is ten times better than ninety percent of the websites on Geocities.
Sorry my name is Bill W.
Yes I NEVER USED IT and so I tried…but that page came up.