R.I.P. Geocities April 23, 2009
Posted by Jill (@bonnjill) in Random musings.trackback
From the PCWorld blog:
GeoCities, a free Web hosting service that achieved fame in the mid-90s, died Thursday at the Yahoo headquarters in Silicon Valley. GeoCities was 15 years old.
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 An antiquated service model and outdated technology are widely blamed for the struggle.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.
GeoCities: 1995 – 2009
…
GeoCities is survived by two cousins, Angelfire and Tripod, along with an uncle, Jeeves. All three are believed to be terminally ill.
Of the 12 remaining GeoCities users, only one was available for comment. “Holy crap!” said the user, a red-faced fellow named Strong Bad. “The scroll buttons and animated GIFs on that site were unbeatable.”
The GeoCities site is expected to remain functional through midyear as a tribute to its life. Funeral arrangements are now pending.
Although I haven’t thought about GeoCities for a long time I have fond memories of trolling its sites in my days of an Internet research.
Musings from an overworked translator 
What a blast from the past!! I started my first website on GeoCities in 1997, called Sarah’s Sofa (clearly my talent for coming up with blindingly original and unique website names has not improved in the intervening years 🙂 ) Among other things, I wrote up tourist information about the Shannon Region in Ireland, and reports and advice on study abroad placements in France, Germany and Spain. I painstakingly coded most of it by hand. Then I didn’t log in for months and months, and lost the whole lot… End of an era, indeed 🙂
A couple of days ago the announcement about the demise of CompuServe’s Internet access, now GeoCities. No better time than a recession to clean house, it seems.
I was thinking the exact same thing, Michael…