No cities left: Geocities shuts down, but won't be forgotten
It's really like taking the ugly duckling, realising that it'll never become a swan, and putting it out of its misery.
Geocities was founded in 1994, and was the first way that many people learned to publish their information on the web. That's probably why so many of the web pages hosted there were so darn awful. Garish 'under construction' banners. Animated GIFs, often featuring twinkling stars and digitised angels. Geocities was like the Internet equivalent of desktop publishing - a playground for those who married technology with awful aesthetic decisions.
When DTP first emerged, the community centres and sports clubs of the world were littered with terribly-designed newsletters, with far too many fonts, and garish layouts. Geocities was the same. It harboured thousands of pages that the owners, h
aving evolved beyond flashing red 30-point times new roman headlines, would often rather forget. In spite of this, there was a move that aimed to save as many of those pages as possible.
A team organised by computer historian Jason Scott, along with another independent effort called Reocities, tried to archive as many of the old sites as possible by downloading and storing them. Why?
Because Geocities, even with its propensity to stop serving up sites when page views exceeded a certain bandwidth, was a slice of Internet history. The internet is such a fast-moving, dynamic, and broad medium that it becomes very difficult to document. Operations like the Internet archive's Wayback Machine do their best to document the millions of pages that come and go on the Internet (this is the remainder of my page from about six years ago). But it's a losing battle, becaus e the number of sites coming into being (and going away again) keeps on growing. And with the predominance of online video and Flash animations, all of the available content becomes harder to collect.
Rest easy, though, because a lot of the old Geocities pages have now been saved. Which should be fun in about five hundred years, when archivists look back over all those old pages, designed by HTML newbies, and ask themselves "What were they thinking?"
Danny Bradbury, MSN Tech and Gadgets
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