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Yahoo Pulls the Plug On GeoCities
Posted by
timothy
on Thu Apr 23, 2009 06:40 PM
from the myspace's-aesthetic-progenitor dept.
from the myspace's-aesthetic-progenitor dept.
Mike writes "It's official: Yahoo is pulling the plug, and GeoCities is dead. GeoCities had suffered a long and drawn-out battle with its health over the past decade. An antiquated service model and outdated technology are widely blamed for the struggle. An official cause of death, however, has yet to be determined. Awful, eye-punishing graphics, lack of relevancy, and 'lowest-common-denominator design' are believed to have contributed to its demise. GeoCities was 15 years old." There is doubtless a lot of funny and informative stuff on there that's worth saving (not just Jesux, which pudge has now migrated). If some of it belongs to you, perhaps you should move it sometime in the next few months. Update: 04/24 18:10 GMT by T : And if you know some GeoCities page owners who aren't especially computer savvy, you could point out to them how easy it is to slurp down their pages for re-hosting elsewhere.
Related Stories
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Archive Team Is Busy Saving Geocities 267 comments
jamie found this note from Jason Scott, who organizes the Archive Team. They are busy downloading as much of Geocities as they can before it vanishes from the Net after Yahoo pulled the plug. (Note: that textfiles.com link is a good candidate for Readability.) "..after 48 hours of work, Archive Team has saved over 200,000 Geocities sites. We're now pulling in new sites at the rate of something like 5 a second. Is that fast enough? We'll see, won't we. ... A side-effect of the whole process is I now know way, way, way too much [sic] about Geocities than I ever expected to. We've had to dissect every aspect of how the site functions to understand how to mirror things, from its history through how it does crazy javascript ads. Some of it is stupid and some is hilarious... We think we have most every site from 1999 and before on Geocities that was left. ... It is more important to me to grab the data than to figure out how to serve it later. People who have been talking about copyright and stuff seem to think I'm going to sell it or take credit or some crap. I don't see how the final collection won't end up online, but how is elusive — maybe a torrent of a bunch of zip files, or as a curated collection, or as a bunch of hard drives. However it is, I'll make sure people can get it, somehow."
[+]
Linux: Jesux is a Bad Pun 339 comments
Lots and lots of Slashdot readers have either sent in this ZDNet article or a direct link to the Jesux homepage." It's a hoax, folks. Think: if you were a Christian believer, would you name your Linux distribution something so close to "Jesus Sucks?" The concept isn't even original; variations on this theme have been floating around the Net for years because of Unix and its "kills" and "aborts" and "daemons."
[+]
Linux: Jesux, Hoax Confirmed 120 comments
[Dilbert] was the first of many to send us over to the self-evident reality that Jesux was a hoax. Check out the story we did about it for more details. *sigh* I'm glad this whole thing is done with. Note from Roblimo: Thanks to Alert Slashdot Reader Suraj Peiris, we know the true identity of the Jesux perpetrator, but as a courtesy, we're not publishing it - or his real e-mail address or the password he uses on his anonymous e-mail accounts. (Pudge, if you're reading this, you'd better change that password RAW!)
Submission: Yahoo Pulls The Plug On GeoCities by Anonymous Coward
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News: Geocities Shutting Down Today 396 comments
Paolo DF writes "Geocities is closing today. Its advent in 1995 was a sign of the rising 'Internet for everyone' era, when connection speeds were 1,000x or 2,000x slower than is common today. You may love it or hate it, but millions of people had their first contact with a Web presence right here. I know that Geocities is something that most Slashdotters will see as a n00b thing — the Internet was fine before Geocities — but nevertheless I think that some credit is due. Heck, there's even a modified xkcd homepage to mark the occasion." Reader commodore64_love notes a few more tributes around the Web. Last spring we discussed Yahoo's announcment that Geocities would be going away.
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RIP (Score:5, Funny)
RIP Geocities, the Friendster of the 90's generation.
Re:RIP (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:RIP (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd agree with the awful .gif's and styles, but they had a lot more going for them than myspace.
Geocities had a lot of content. A huge amount of useful information. Especially the pre-Yahoo stuff. Many times over the last decade I've ended up on a Geocities website when researching particular subjects (sorry - can't give any examples, but more than a couple dozen times when looking at some obscure stuff).
This is sad, but bound to happen. For a long while Geocities was the only place hobbyists could spew their knowledge. Now it's all over the place. Hopefully the internet archive can hold on to some of those soon-to-be lost gems.
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Re:RIP (Score:5, Funny)
VF Designer [geocities.com]
Unfortunately the pain isn't limited to geocities... more pain here [dokimos.org].
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Re:RIP (Score:5, Funny)
Gotta throw a warning up next time.
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Re:RIP (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:RIP (Score:4, Informative)
This [geocities.com] was in my browser history.
Bit outdated, but indicative of the fact that useful stuff resides on geocities.
Oh, just remembered zx32 [geocities.com] which I used to use back in my Windows days.
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Re:RIP (Score:5, Insightful)
Here's where everyone neglects the fact that Geoshitties was a huge lead-up to the blog.
People with no interest in html, css, hosting, dns, etc. want to brain-dump on the intarwebs too. Geocities did it first, now you go start a blog.
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Re:RIP (Score:5, Insightful)
Unfortunately like all good resources, diamonds in the rough. You have to wade through so much shit that you end up almost giving up. Almost... then you find the gem, and cherish it.
While it is sad to see it gone, the horrid gaudy gif sites will not be missed.
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Re:RIP (Score:5, Informative)
Geocities had a lot of content. A huge amount of useful information. Especially the pre-Yahoo stuff.
Yes. For example websites devoted to the internals of GW-Basic. I don't write new programs in it, but I still convert old programs written in it. Also, the early versions of G77 for Windows are there plus documentation plus collections of compiled libraries.
A bigger bite is for those of us whose ISPs were the baby Bells. I still have an old web page that is essentially prodigy. 15 MB limit, one level, browser based updating and file creation, but it's ad free and still there. More recent customers found their personal web pages are hosted on Geocities, complete with their icky ad overlays.
Yahoo managed to crap up the e-mail side too, when they migrated their customers to "Yahoo mail". I pay for e-mail as part of my internet access. If I want to read e-mail on the web, it comes with ads.
So I'm not entirely sorry that Geocities is going away. And as bad as AT&T and Yahoo are, both are far better than the local cable company.
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Re:RIP (Score:5, Funny)
Yes, let us all take a moment to remember the days of Geocities,Angelfire, hooking up to the net with Earthlink or AOHell dialup, and of course the evil plague that spread across the net at that time, I speak of course of all the dumbasses that put comet cursor [wikipedia.org] crap all over their Geocities and Angelfire web pages, which always felt like 3 out of four.
you would spend 10 minutes dealing with that annoying screech as the dialup hooked up and then would go to find out when your favorite band would be coming to town or your favorite sci fi writer would have out their new book by visiting the fansites, when all of a sudden, and without warning at all, it was "GAAAK! Somebody just turned my cursor into a butterfly crapping fairy dust and dragging a pocket watch hooked to it ass! And my PC is now slower than a 386 running Win95!"
Ah yes, those were the days. Malware wasn't all over the place because that damned comet cursor made your PC too damned slow to do anything with, and Earthlink and AOHell would toss you at random intervals so making a spambot was pretty pointless. Now of course we have different kinds of evil, like Myspace pages designed in the "OMG Ponies!" look that can blind a man at 30 yards as well as making him sterile, folks with high speed Internet connections that fill our tubes with spam because the moron will click on ANYTHING that has the words "tits" or "lesbos" in it,it truly is a different world now. But for all the great fansites that DIDN'T have comet cursors on them (all 3 of you) I bow my head in a moment of remembrance for the passing of Geocities. For those of us who beards are turning Grey the name does bring back memories.
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Re:RIP (Score:5, Funny)
folks with high speed Internet connections that fill our tubes with spam because the moron will click on ANYTHING that has the words "tits" or "lesbos" in it,it truly is a different world now.
Your tits and lesbos link seems to be broken. You owe me a new mouse.
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Re:RIP (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent isn't /funny/. He's being dead serious, that's how it was back in the late '90s.
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good memories (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:good memories (Score:5, Funny)
Propping up a camera?
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The Neighborhoods (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:The Neighborhoods (Score:5, Interesting)
I had SiliconVally/8043 over a decade ago. Even back then it bothered me that they didn't really do much with the Neighborhood concept other than to categorize sites. I always thought it could have been something that allowed people to network and find others with similar tastes and ideas. Basically a poor-man's version of social networking sites that are all the rage today.
I've got to be getting old, there were so many really good ideas back then that got about 90% of the way towards the major Internet trends that we see today only to completely fall over into obscurity well before their time.
I used to have a copy of the Internet Yellow Pages. A physical book. The same size and shape as a telephone yellow-pages. At the time it was printed, it listed most of the relevant sites devoted to a particular subject and it was actually pretty darn thorough. Most of the URLs back then were .edu, .gov, or .net. Only a few .com and almost no .org. There were a few entries for FTP and Gopher sites scattered here and there as well. Good times. I wonder if I still have that book stashed away somewhere, the Internet was such an incredibly different place back then.
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Re:The Neighborhoods (Score:5, Interesting)
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Advertisement (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't remember much about Geocities, but I do remember that I absolutely HATED having their advertisements on my page.
It's funny, though, if you look at MySpace or Facebook now they're absolutely cluttered with flashy, obtrusive advertisements and I don't give it much thought. Guess it goes to show, you can get used to anything.
An old saying... (Score:4, Funny)
The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.
Prodigy tried the flashy nasty ad thing before AOL and was pulverized for it. AOL made a whole business plan around it.
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Speak for yourself (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Speak for yourself (Score:5, Insightful)
It's the band's fault if their MySpace/Facebook page doesn't have any good information, tour dates, or anything else that might be useful.
I've seend plenty of excellent band pages. Unfortunately, the sucky ones outweigh the good ones, but don't blame MySpace.
(There's plenty of other things to hate MySpace for.)
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Re:Advertisement (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't remember much about Geocities, but I do remember that I absolutely HATED having their advertisements on my page.
An old trick we used back in the day was to open a noscript tag, but not close it. This kept all the ads from showing up. Of course you couldn't run javascript on it from there, but in 1998, who cared.
Parent
Meh.. (Score:5, Insightful)
For all the griping people do.. it wasn't that bad
And it's visual design tool really was amazing.
Users didn't need to worry about arranging stuff into tables.. you could just drag your graphic where ever you wanted .. or put text anywhere.. etc.
Sure, it let a lot of garbage leak onto the Internet.. but it also let people with something interesting to contribute an easy way of doing so.
And lets face it.. was the output of a geocities website designed with the visual designer that much different than most of the myspace pages you see? (that isn't an endorsement for myspace..). If you have interesting content.. the design matters a lot less (and again.. not saying that myspace contains interesting content).
Too Bad (Score:5, Interesting)
As somebody who learned HTML and Javascript with GeoCities, that's really too bad. Yes, GeoCities is the home of the stereotypical mid 90's "home page" with animated gifs and background MIDI music but I still occasionally come across very worthwhile information on GeoCities via Google and in terms of reliable free hosting with pretty unobtrusive ads it was pretty good. It seems somewhat rash to just shut it down outright.
I wonder if there isn't some way they could just take a snapshot of the domain as it is right now, and then keep that online. Give site owners the ability to delete their site, but no longer allow editing or uploading. That would be pretty low maintenance and certainly they still receive ad revenue from it, but maybe not enough to cover costs.
hmm. familiar (Score:5, Funny)
"Awful, eye-punishing graphics, lack of relevancy, and 'lowest-common-denominator design' are believed to have contributed to it's demise."
Sounds like myspace
Re:hmm. familiar (Score:5, Insightful)
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Parent
Progress? (Score:5, Funny)
GeoCities:
Learn HTML, post Animated Gifs, Blare Midis
MySpace:
post Animated Gifs, Blare Mp3s
YouTube:
Blare "Animated" Videos with Sound
Twitter:
Blare
Re:Progress? (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
good riddance to bad rubbish (Score:5, Interesting)
i hosted my first website, a WW II history site, on geocities - before the ad requirements got out of hand. when their ads got completely obnoxious, i asked for a way to keep the ad in a top frame, or any way to keep it from covering my content, but was told to pony up cash.
random ads over WW II pictures, especially some of the pictures of fallen soldiers I had up, didn't sit well with me - so I ponied up cash for a real webhost, and didn't look back.
perhaps i'm just too good at holding a grudge, but i'm glad they're dead.
Re:good riddance to bad rubbish (Score:5, Funny)
especially some of the pictures of fallen soldiers I had up, didn't sit well with me...perhaps i'm just too good at holding a grudge, but i'm glad they're dead.
The beauty of context.
Parent
While most here are going to rag on Geocities ... (Score:5, Insightful)
The reason we cann all remember Geocities was because there was neat stuff on it!!! Geocities was home to all the quirky people who had all sorts of goodies to post on the web, and no other means to do so.
Re:While most here are going to rag on Geocities . (Score:5, Insightful)
Ain't it the truth. Geocities attracted some of the most eye-gougingly terrible amateur designs, but shit, a lot of those people went on to lose the colorblindness, but kept the technical know-how they gained with their first little hobby site. I certainly did.
Parent
I was there when GeoCities was acquired (Score:5, Funny)
This Comment Is Still Under Construction (Score:5, Funny)
<blink>This Comment Is Still Under Construction</blink>
(yes, even after 15 years)
And this is a spinning GIF logo. Your browser is just too tasteful to display it.
I felt a great disturbance in the force (Score:5, Funny)
As if millions of internet web pages suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened....
If you build it, they will come... (Score:4, Insightful)
Back in the Day... (Score:5, Interesting)
...I ran a Pokemon fansite on Geocities which offered midis of the game's music, tips (really just reading Tips&Tricks and putting it on my site, kind of like blogs), information on the different versions and ROMs of the Gameboy games. I got my first Cease and Desist letter, ever, from Nintendo. Because of my Geocities site.
Geocities, you will forever be in my heart.
It's were we learned how the internet works. (Score:5, Interesting)
Who cares about the ugly designs? They were "ugly" because people actually had the freedom to upload whatever they wanted, and who goes to the internet to watch "pretty" things anyway, especially 15 years ago, when you couldn't find 2 browsers that would show a page the same way?
For the younger generation (I was 13), who hadn't been to college, we only had a dial-up connection and no way to know about ftp, gopher, usenet, etc; geocities gave us a way to experiment and learn how the internet worked.
Today everything is trapped inside something else (facebook, myspace, blogging platforms, news sites), does anyone understand what happens with their data after they publish it? where does it go, where does it come from when it shows up on their browser?
I need more time! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Value (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know, when researching some really really old file formats for some old games, I found that a lot of documentation for them was held on sites like geocities, long since forgotten about and destined to be lost if Yahoo just pulls the plug completely. No doubt there's a fair amount of information littered over the service amidst all of the Frontpage 97 templated gif-fests.
At the very least, they should let archive.org or something back the whole damn thing up, it may have been a rubbish service, but it's still an important part of internet history.
That and they'd actually be able to supply some decent bandwidth to the things.
Parent
Re:Value (Score:5, Interesting)
And nothing of value was lost.
Something of great value was lost!
Unfortunately it was lost long ago.
I remember the original Geocities... well before Yahoo bought them out. It was a thriving community of Internet users, the kind of people that had Internet access but didn't have web space, or their own server to host pages.
If you can't remember a Geocities before Yahoo! then please think twice before dismissing it.
If it wasn't for Geocities, I probably wouldn't be a Web Developer now. I used to code up pages on my ageing 8086 (without a graphical web browser, so I had no way of testing), I used to take the HTML files into college which had computers powerful enough to run Netscape. After a bit of debugging, I'd upload them to Geocities and they were live!
Sure, some people had nice web servers that their companies paid for, but I couldn't afford that, I just had my college's 1KB/sec Internet connection and my free Geocities account. It served me well!
I'll miss Geocities.
I'll also miss every other service that Yahoo! butchered too! Anyone remember the original Rocketmail, OneList? WebRing? Launch.com? All Seeing Eye?
All great services ruined by Yahoo!
I still use Flickr, but I worry for its future. Yahoo! have a bad history!
Last but not least...
RIP Geocities. You served me well! It's a pity Yahoo! murdered you!
Parent
Re:Value (Score:5, Interesting)
You were using an 8086 then? You could probably have fished a perfectly usable 286 or 386 machine out of a hospital dumpster for free, or bought such a computer for dirt cheap. I even had a 486sx/33 chip my rich (yet not pretentious) friend handed down to me around the time GC was born, though it took me a few months to get the rest of the components.
That's cool you were doing that and remember all that stuff! I remember using NCSA mosaic in 16-color windows 3.11, and how cool the beta netscape was. And before then I was serious into BBS's.
In fact, it was because of geocities that I came up with a nifty "hosting" service (namebooster.com, now owned by some squatter) that would allow you to have a domain name, and have it take you to a painfully long geocities URL. At first I did it in cgi, but then I learned apache rewrite rules that made it easier to manage. I didn't really make any money off of that, but it did open the door to some crazy adventures I encountered shortly after during the .com boom.
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Re:It hurts me inside (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:It hurts me inside (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd say there's a good chance Google will still be around in 10 years. I'd say there's very little chance Facebook is. And I'd say there's not a snowball's chance in Hell that Twitter is around in 5 years, never mind 10.
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Re:It hurts me inside (Score:5, Interesting)
I'd say there's a good chance Google will still be around in 10 years.
You know what, 10 years ago, I'd have said that there'd be a good chance that AltaVista will still be around in 10 Years!
If you don't know what AltaVista is then you might want to Google it. 10 years ago, you'd likely have AltaVista'd Google to find out what Google was!
AltaVista is still around but it's a subsidiary of Google. I'm not saying that Google won't be around in 10 years... I'm just saying that 10 years is a long time in Internet time!
Talking of which, does anyone else remember Internet Time [wikipedia.org]?
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Re:It hurts me inside (Score:5, Funny)
Luckily for us, I think we will still have the real Arnold Schwarzenegger for defense, and if not, we will always have digitized CGI models of him to wage binary wars on the new GooMartBucksWangCletusPlane superstructure....
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Re:It hurts me inside (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Yahoo business acumen? (Score:5, Funny)
You slashdotted Geocities! Most impressive!
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Re:The ruins of the old Internet (Score:5, Interesting)
As much as people are bashing Geocities, consider*:
* This is going from memory, 14 years ago now.
I don't mind saying I had a GeoCities page, for several years from 1995 on. It wasn't much, but it was mine. I edited it in the college labs (faster than dialup, and free!) and shared it with friends and family from their home computers. Times were good.
Of course, I also used tables and transparent GIFs for layout; there was no CSS back then. And pay-per-minute dial-up was lousy. And there was no Google (remember having to use different search engines for different topics? I remember preferring AltaVista.) No Wikipedia, either -- Encarta was great, though. (Which reminds me, farewell, Encarta. You helped me through many a paper.)
Great; now I'm feeling nostalgic. Does anyone remember canyon.mid? [youtube.com] Man, I used to listen to that all the time. Of course, then I discovered Impulse Tracker, [wikipedia.org] and realized that MIDI was crap (except perhaps as a control language for devices.)
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