GeoCities Japan Is Finally Shutting Down (qz.com) 48
"A decade ago, internet users who grew up with Web 1.0 bid a fond farewell to Sunset Strip, Rodeo Drive, Colosseum, and other 'neighborhoods' on web-hosting service GeoCities, when Yahoo announced it was shutting the main site down," writes Isabella Steger for Quartz. "Now Japanese GeoCities fans will face the same fate." From the report: Yahoo Japan announced today (Oct. 1) that it will shut down (link in Japanese) its GeoCities service in March 2019, 22 years after its launch. The company said in a statement that it was hard to encapsulate in one word the reason for the shut down, but that profitability and technological issues were primary factors. It added that it was full of "regret" for the fate of the immense amount of information that would be lost as a result of the service's closure. Japan is the only country where the web hosting service remained in operation. Like the main GeoCities, the Japanese service was also organized around different themed neighborhoods. For example, websites in the Silicon Valley neighborhood were tech-focused, while those in Berkeley focused on education.
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Those are 90s web sites, tiny in comparison to today's animation heavy monsters. Aren't GeoCities sites static anyway? Then why couldn't they just make a tar of everything and hand it over to archive.org?
Yeah, something doesn't add up. If they are low traffic then the cost is negligible and if they are high traffic then they should be able to make money from ads. Basically, whatever the traffic is, putting ads on them should more than cover the cost of the servers.
Re:Damn. Now I'm going to have to move... (Score:4, Funny)
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I used to have AOL CDs, but then I decided I needed a new gaming chair https://makezine.com/2006/03/1... [makezine.com]
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Re:How hard is it to make a static archive? (Score:5, Informative)
The U.S. version of Geocities is archived here. I'm sure some enterprising Japanese person will do the same:
http://www.oocities.org/ [oocities.org]
.
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Dang. If it was a complete archive I know I've got a page buried down in there somewhere, but I have no idea what my username was back then :(.
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My website is still there, however when I heard Geocities was closing, I went in and erased all of the pictures. (I don't like leaving personal info behind.) Now it's just plain text and broken links.
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I got happy for a minute.
There were pretty good babylon 5 reviews on http://www.geocities.com/jenof... [geocities.com]. But it doesn't look like his made the archive cut.
His Buffy and Angel reviews are pretty good. I remember checking each day after a new episode to see if his review was up.
http://www3.sympatico.ca/ [sympatico.ca]
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Geoshitties (Score:1)
Too bad it's gone.
Long Past. (Score:3)
I was a real kid of the 90's. I hit my teens on the early part and ended them on the later part. I remember taking early high school webdesign and the cool thing to do was to create your own personal web page. Myspace (Facebook's precursor) wasn't even a thing yet so having your own web space was elite stuff (especially since it had to be entirely coded from scratch) and geocities helped that happened.
It's better now that the internet isn't such an elitist space but a lot of culture I really do miss was lost in it becoming as such. I have very heavy nerd nostalgia for all of those Geocities sites.
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Remember web rings?
Before social media existed and back when search engines were crap, it was hard to find sites and getting your personal site some exposure and visitors was difficult. There were numerous solutions, the two big ones being curated web directories (like Yahoo) and web rings. The web ring was a thing you put on your site with a next and previous link to the adjacent sites in the ring. All sites in the ring would be related to the same subject.
The web was a much smaller place back then.
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I do remember those although I didn't as of that posting. Nice reference.
And yet... (Score:5, Interesting)
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It's more to do with an aspect of Japanese culture and the way Japan gets a lot of unique technology.
Japan is sometimes called the Galapagos of tech, because a lot of technology exists there that never reaches the rest of the world. It's seen as a testing ground for new ideas in the consumer space, and partly as a result of that has its own very unique consumer market. You can still buy flip phones in Japan, and there are many Japan only models and an even larger amount of Japan only software. Same on deskt
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Another Grand Yahoo Screwup (Score:4, Interesting)
Geocities was once a well-known name, Internet-wise. They could have offered a simple CMS interface in addition to raw HTML, and been what Facebook is, or at least what Blogger is (now owned by Google).
Context-sensitive banner ads at the top or bottom could have paid for it because Geocities was already divided by topic categories, simplifying targeted ads, which advertisers love.
But Yahoo purchased it and ruined it like everything else they ruined. Yahoo had their long fingers in almost every category*: search, social media, blogging, self-hosting, email, shopping (Amazon-esque), discussion groups, and others. Then fucked up each and every one. Their train of fuckups is so long, one thinks it may have been intentional: somebody at the top must have been afraid of success.
Yahoo was handed the Golden Keys to the Kingdom on a red pillow, but swallowed them and then shitted out of the back of the jet on the way to The Gate To The Internet.
It's comparable to the record company who turned down the early Beatles because "guitars are falling out of style"; except Yahoo turned down the Beatles, the Who, Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Three Dog Night, and Aretha Franklin.
* or at least early versions of them
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I used Geocities fairly often back then, and I don't remember such. If such existed, it was not well-publicized, and/or sucked so bad that I quickly ignored and forgot it.
There were desktop products from other vendors for producing static pages: Dreamweaver precursors. There were also 3rd-party HTML templates for static sites that could be uploaded to Geocities. I vaguely remember Geocities offering templates, but you still had to edit the HTML yourself to change anything: it wasn't a CMS, just a "getting s
DO NOT COPY (Score:1)
So the old (not really) joke is all the japanese homepages that littered the japanese sections of the web were usually hyper-niche sites that almost always had a DO NOT COPY or similar engrish comment. Which is kinda relevant in this case because it is an affirmative statement by the content creator/owner (assuming rights didn't transfer to Yahoo Japan).
Japan used to have some strange copyright rules such that even archives of culturally relevant content by the National Library were explicitly forbidden unt
crapflooding (Score:3)
Sooooooo much crapflooding in the comments here. Maybe Faceboot's troll army don't want us to remember the old, free internet. Back when there were lots of interesting sites, rather than the homogeneous corporate garbage "content" they shovel at us today.
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