GeoCities Making A Comeback On The Web

GeoCities is making a comeback. Looking at our referrers log today i see two backlinks coming from a GeoCities domain and checked them out. One of our old time bbs users had a bunch of pages on there that are live today through GeoCities.ws domain.

The two pages i looked at auto refresh and are heavily loaded with advertisements including auto starting videos that made scrolling the page difficult. Gotta generate revenue to fund the project somehow i guess.

But none the less someone is attempting to revive those archived geocities user pages. The domain geocities.ws has a private registration and has been registered since 2009 according to whois records.

From this web archive: GeoCities is what showed Yahoo! at its best. In 2009, Yahoo! succeeded in destroying the most amount of history in the shortest amount of time, certainly on purpose, in known memory. Millions of files, user accounts, all gone.

GeoCities was a once very popular web hosting service founded in 1994 and purchased by Yahoo in 1999. Marked by its once-generous allotment of 15 megabytes and the free (with added advertisements) price, it was at one point the 3rd most-browsed site on the World Wide Web.

Because the site was free and marketed primarily to first-time or relatively new internet users, the quality of websites on GeoCities became a persistent, oft-referred joke – the amateurish layout, use of animated gifs, and prone-to-personal websites dominated the standard pages, and were often abandoned by their owners for good soon after finding better approaches to telling their stories or showing off their data.

While the natural urge by some would be to let GeoCities sink into obscurity and death, leaving nothing in its wake but bad memories and shudders of recognition at endless “under construction” GIFs, the fact remains that it was for millions of people the first experience dealing with the low-cost, full-color, world-accessible website and all the possibilities this contained. To not at least have the option of browsing these old sites would be a loss of the very history of the web from the side of the people who came to know it, not the designers who descended upon it. For that reason, Archive Team thinks it is worth saving.

It was pleasing to look back on Suzie Bears old GeoCities pages, GeoCites has went out like the Bulletin Board System (BBS) but many still exist today, just like Doc’s Place to keep the tradition alive. Most folks including a lot of old SysOps have went over to Facebook and Google Plus. But it’s nice to reminisce about the webs beginning, and of course the Bulletin Board System.

Just my two cents worth as usual! 😉