So Long, GeoCities: We Forgot You Still Existed (PC World)

[DrewWilson]

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 An antiquated service model and outdated technology are widely blamed for the struggle.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 was born as "Beverly Hills Internet" in the winter of 1995. Its parents, David Bohnett and John Rezner, wanted to create a virtual community that mimicked the real world, with pages hosted in "cyber cities" and other similarly nauseating concepts.

Both teenagers and first-generation Internet dorks (known then as "former SysOps") flocked to the service, setting up personal pages in the "cyber cities" of their choice. Despite GeoCities' built-in watermarks and on-page advertisements, the site's popularity continued to climb, and the shame its users should have felt for creating abhorrent content within its servers continued to remain repressed

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Is it my imagination, or have YouTube/Digg commenters spread spread further around the web then I thought? I'm referring to both the comments and the writer. Still, interesting news.

[Signa]

Well, my website is still up.

[1cooldude]

$4.7 billion from Yahoo! What's a billion today?

[Boomer The Dog]

Geo never seemed like a friendly site, with the ads and pages that got shut down because of high bandwidth -- and I used to see that ALL the time. It got so that I'd think twice about going if someone was on a site there.

I guess they helped people out in earlier times, but they didn't change enough. There is something cool about creating a site right out of your head and experimenting with the design though, you built it yourself from raw codes without wiki formats or blog software templates.