BlueWolf's Howl

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October 27, 2009

GeoCities is Dead?

Oh, no....
CNN says that Yahoo is closing GeoCities!

Wow. Suddenly I feel so Internet Old.

If you really want to know - GeoCities died sometime around the introduction of Netscape 3 or so...

Back in the day... when I first signed up for Internet access, my ISP allowed each customer a whole 5 MB of web space. And at the time - it was PLENTY! I created an entire web site within that space - with links, newsletter, etc.. But at that time, pictures were static and web pages were mostly filled with text. The year was 1996 and I was easily found frittering away the hours in chatrooms. In was in those chatrooms that I learned HTML. And of course, since I had two 'handles' in the chatrooms, I had to have two pages... So off to Geo I went. It was a really good place for a starter page.

Geo started going downhill for a number of reasons and in a number of ways. There were fights in the neighborhoods. Eventually there were bandwidth limits - and if too many people had gone to your page (or if you had a number of pics on it), you could easily use up your bandwidth for the day. And then came the onslaught of cheaper disk space and reasonable web hosting accounts.

But when it was new, it was good. You could easily put up a little 'about me' page and link it to your chat handle. That way if someone *really* wanted to know about you, they could click the link and you didn't have to bother with the same questions over and over. [Where does your handle come from? Where are you from?] And sometimes it was a conversation starter. Oh, I see you're into such-and-such... and you could actually talk to a stranger about some common interest - instead of small talk and flirting. Yes - I used to actually TALK to people in chatrooms. It was interesting and I learned a lot. But mostly... I went there so people would click the link and it would up my hit counter... [Don't I just live on the edge?]

Although the site 'bit the dust' a long time ago, it still puts a note of sadness in the air that a part of the early Internet history has been closed down. RIP GeoCities ...along with DejaNews and other staples of the Internet Past.

Posted by BlueWolf on October 27, 2009 08:38 PM