Raise your hand if you made your first website on GeoCities. Now raise your hand if you remember your old website’s address. Yahoo has reportedly decided to stop accepting new accounts and will close down GeoCities later this year.
In 1996 I threw together a few pictures and a quick paragraph about who I was and where I lived. It was pretty basic and except for a few friends’ pictures (at least one of whom was worried about stalkers) I can’t imagine anyone wanting to spend a lot of time there. Still, I threw up a counter and even a Guestbook — I did have 4MB of space after all. I forgot about it for years and in 2002 I remember looking it up. It was still there.
Most personal websites were about that deep, it seems. A lot of personal pictures, a ton of cat pics, a lots of animated GIFs. Strong Bad’s take on them was pretty accurate. A few smart people put up their resumes. A few less-than-smart people put up their resumes forgetting their background picture was them wearing a cheesehead and chugging a Colt 45.
Yahoo bought them out in 1999, long after I made my first page and people began grousing about pop-up ads and really small upload allotments. At the time, Yahoo paid over $2 billion for them and pre-sale share prices were over $100 on the NASDAQ. Once Yahoo bought them, the lure of a “FREE WEB PAGE!!” seemed a little less enticing after other services came out with more space and less on-screen clutter. Plus, they usually didn’t have the confusing naming system that came with GeoCities: I remember my site was in the “SunsetStrip” category followed by a random number.
Anyway, here’s to GeoCities: you let a bunch of us get our feet wet online. Thanks for letting us post pictures of our dogs, kids, and vacations. Thanks for the free email back when that was a novelty. And thanks for the chance to let some of us to make up business cards with a long website name, just to look cool.
