“Sorry, GeoCities has closed”. That is the message that showed up since yesterday’s afternoon on Yahoo! © GeoCities web page.
GeoCities was founded on 1994 and offered a free web space for everyone. I had the pleasure to host my first web pages (literally) with them. I admit that I can’t recall what content I have put there but certainly it was a not-so-complex html code and a few pictures. I had internet access since 1993. Back then, internet usage was ‘restrictive’ in today means and was made up of pictures and text text and pictures which were brought up by a whooping speed of 2400 baud! There were no flashy ads, no videos and Internet (and) Explorer were two words with no apparent connection.
In 1999 Yahoo! payed $3.57 billion in stock and took control over GeoCities. Later on this year, GeoCities was the 3rd most visited site in the World Wide Web (inferior only to AOL and Yahoo!). Users had found GeoCities as a convenient place to share information. Some users had only checked out their skills in design with many web pages left alone in the dark.
In recent years people stated that GeoCities was mainly a web site graveyard but it surely had some great info. This has led few organization to try archive GeoCities before it dies. Two of them are Archive.org and Reocities.
RIP GeoCities.
