20 Jul 2009

Bye Bye Geocities

I recently received an email from Yahoo saying that "GeoCities is closing." Geocities users won't be able to access their accounts after October 26, 2009.

I joined this free web site building service and community way back in 1998 and built my first web site on it. The site was about my favourite places, my attempts at poetry, photographs, my research on pines and favourite links. It also had an "Environmental" page talking about my concern about Mother Earth.



At that time Geocities was one of the most popular sites on the Web and We had a real sense of community then. I was really fond of their Page builder interface which let amateurs like me get a feel of designing web pages without using html. I did eventually learnt html and later CSS. Designing my pages by trial and error was really frustrating and exciting at the same time. My web site would often disappear completely or appear as a mass of strange coding.

I guess Yahoo never really harnessed the full potential of Geocities like Google did with Blogger. I mean, even after more than 10 years, it was almost the same. No user friendly innovations or updates. I guess one reason for the decline was the growing popularity of blogs especially blogger with their blogspot blogs. I got tired of static sites and hardly updated my Geocities site. I cannot even recall the last time I actually visited it but I still left it online as most of my old friends found me via the site.

I will definitely miss Geocities.

Does anyone else have fond memories of Geocities?

3 comments:

ksong said...

i used to have a geocities website also. but that is like few yearsss ago. I think is right decision for yahoo to shut down geocities since it is losing it popularity & can save some cost.

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regards,
ksong

Italian Guy said...

Ah Geocities...the memories. What did Yahoo pay for that, like 3 billion dollars?

Dilip Mutum said...

Ksong: I guess they failed to take advantage of the full potential. They simply didn't keep up with the new developments including blogs and their not so friendly interface didn't help get new users either.
Italian guy: yes, around that figure. According to Wikipedia Yahoo paid $3.57 billion in stock . However, techcrunch puts a lower figure of $2.87 billion.