Geocities shuts its gates
In 1995 Geocities (originally Beverley Hills Internet) appeared and gave us budding site builders the chance to make our mark on the Internet - for FREE! Its originators picked up on the prospect of developing communities of like-minded individuals and arranged the sites, or homesteads as they were called (if memory serves!), in neighbourhoods. Just as you would if you were buying a real house in a community, you simply found the spot you wanted, clicked on the available house and bingo, the plot was yours to populate with a site of your choosing.
It was a novel idea and ingrained in me the potential of online communities. Of course, as the web developed and with it facebook, bebo and twitter, choosing one’s ‘neighbours’ became possible. You were no longer stuck next to someone who dedicated their presence to bodily-functions. Not that I can talk. I developed something utterly inane and ghastly, probably to do with flying saucers or music or both.
I wish I could recall my address. It was something like www.geocities.com/Area51/4794.
At its height, there were something like 30 million web pages in Geocities but people traded up from the constraints of the technology and domain name offered and moved away. Now, Yahoo, who bought Geocities in 1999 for $3.6 billion (ouch) have closed the gates on those neighbourhoods. My plot was long since abandoned but many still remained and have been forcibly evicted.
Geocities offers us a fascinating snapshot on the early public web and a lesson in how things evolve, people’s attitudes and demands change and whilst people will always want to broadcast themselves to the world, they don’t want to rely on learning the skills to build from the ground up. Hence the reason they’ve gravitated towards Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, Blogger and Wordpress to take the pain out of broadcasting themselves online.
