R.I.P. Geocities…

For those of you who may be “Web 1.0″ veterans, Geocities probably has a place close to your heart. Geocities wasn’t the home of my first website, but it was one of the first. I remember venturing across Geocities and their free hosting plans and I subscribed. I thought their “geocentric” neighborhoods was a neat concept and far ahead of its time. It could have been the first MySpace or Facebook but never managed to get to that point.

Geocities was bought by Yahoo in 1999 for a whopping $3.6 billion dollars. At that time, Geocities was hosting 2.5 million websites. Doing the quick math, that made each site hoted on Geocities worth $1,000! And we all recall the quality of sites that were hosted on Geocities…

The founders, David Bohnett and John Rezner, were smart and sold at the peak. Unfortunately, the corporate world got ahold of Geocities which many attribute for its massive decline. To this date, Geocities never made a profit…

Nonetheless, Geocities holds a place in Internet lore and a special little place for me. As a young lad, 12 years old or so, Geocities gave me one of the first free forums to do what I do today: develop content for the Internet. Things have changed and Geocities couldn’t manage to keep up with that change, but for what it provided millions like me, Geocities deserves a round of applause. R.I.P Geocities, 1995 – 2009.

News Story: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8016211.stm

Wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geocities


Brian Onorio
Brian Onorio is the President of O3 Strategies, Inc. The wearer of many hats, Brian is involved in almost every aspect of the day-to-day operations of the company. A 2004 graduate of the North Carolina State University College of Engineering, Brian's forte is product development. Fluent in the language of technology, Brian turns 1's and 0's into a beautiful and elegant solution that is comprised of one part science, one part art.

11 Responses

  • Al McElmon
    May 4th, 2009 at 15:30 | #1

    I sure wish I could get $1,000 a pop for any one of the tons of sites I developed in the 90s on geocities. But, in an effort to clean up some of the trash circulating the internet, I suppose killing off geocities isn’t a bad start. It had its place and time, but now that you can get a starter server for just about free, it’s time to move on. However; like you, I am grateful for the service it provided, allowing me to get my feet wet on the net as well. But I’ll always be bias twords Angelfire :D

  • Brian Onorio
    May 4th, 2009 at 15:33 | #2

    Angelfire… now that’s a site I’ve long since forgotten…

  • Niko
    May 4th, 2009 at 15:39 | #3

    Not sad to see it go. At all.

    Geocities was the MySpace of early web design… Everyone had an account, and pretty much all of them were so atrocious that they were unusable.

    Sure, it’s got some fond memories for some people out there, but only if you were one of those noobs that thought your site was badass. Let me tell you: it wasn’t.

  • Brian Onorio
    May 4th, 2009 at 15:41 | #4

    Haha, quality aside, and that’s not even a question because 98% of Geocities sites were unquestionably bad, but I think you’re missing the point.

    Geocities was more than what it produced. For me, at least, it was my first free experience into web design. And for the record, I made some unquestionably bad sites with Geocities too.

  • Niko
    May 4th, 2009 at 15:47 | #5

    Cmon, while it’s true that some had the unfortunate luck to start out with Geocities and ended up doing web stuff for a living (probably out of a desire to combat the crap that people built on GeoCities tbh), this does not justify this horrible place to build websites. Like many other bad things ™, GeoCities’ death will be praised more than mourned.

    Sorry to rain on your parade, but let’s be real. :D

  • Brian Onorio
    May 4th, 2009 at 15:50 | #6

    Not true. I did some reading today on the Geocities funeral. I think nostalgia alone will cause people to be at least on the little side of sad at this development.

    Again, I don’t question your “quality” argument. What Geocities produced could aptly be considered the “litter of the Internet.”

  • Niko
    May 4th, 2009 at 15:53 | #7

    I don’t doubt that people will mourn GeoCities’ passing. God bless the bits that were put to the magnet eraser earlier… they deserved much better than to be a GeoCities’ bit. :)

  • Mital
    May 4th, 2009 at 16:24 | #8

    Somehow one of my Geocities sites is still up. Too bad I have no way of getting the login information.

    Talk about nostalgia.

  • Jason Deans
    May 5th, 2009 at 11:22 | #9

    I predict twitter will have the same fate without major overhaul.

  • Brian Onorio
    May 5th, 2009 at 11:35 | #10

    I don’t know… the reason Geocities eventually fell was quality of content. Literally every Geocities page was littered with ads and unsuitable to really use for personal or business reasons. Twitter is being used by regular joes and businesses and it’s pretty effective. I think the difference between Geocities and Twitter is one of the two delivers decent, user-supplied content.

    I predict mySpace will soon go the way of Geocities.

  • Al McElmon
    May 7th, 2009 at 15:28 | #11

    I can’t imagine Rupert Murdoch will let that happen anytime soon. Just last month he appointed a senior manager of facebook on the team to try and revitalize the product. I do agree though, that their current codebase can not survive the competition. Twitter on the other hand, will one day be linked to mass hysteria and devolution.

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