GeoCities dies in March 2019, and with it a piece of internet history

[bing101]

https://www.cnet.com/news/geocities-dies-in-march-2019-and-with-it-a-piece-of-internet-history/


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TMDSZWkEJYo


Note only Yahoo Japan is affected by this change to remove Geocities.


As far as I know for the past decade Blogging services like Blogger and Wordpress have killed off geocities and Angel Fire though.

[jon daly]

I had no idea that Geocities still existed. I'm not sure if that's the site that hosted this, but seeing the name Geocities made me recall early homepages by people that include ones like a Jim Nabors Tribute page complete with unlicensed images of him and  a midi file of the Gomer Pyle theme on what sounded like a Casio.

It was stuff like that that made me mentally rhyme Geocities with atrocities.

[bandit957]

Every time I think of GeoCities, I think of the poorly designed page full of misspelled words where a guy tried to list all the times he saw someone blow a bubble with bubble gum in public, and the guestbook for it that was full of people arguing.

[abefroman329]

I had no idea that Geocities still existed. I'm not sure if that's the site that hosted this, but seeing the name Geocities made me recall early homepages by people that include ones like a Jim Nabors Tribute page complete with unlicensed images of him and  a midi file of the Gomer Pyle theme on what sounded like a Casio.

It was stuff like that that made me mentally rhyme Geocities with atrocities.

There was also one, inspired by the urban legend that Marilyn Manson was also Paul from The Wonder Years, that was a badly-Photoshopped photo of Marilyn Manson with the cast of The Wonder Years and a midi version of the Joe Cocker cover of With A Little Help From My Friends (the theme song to The Wonder Years).

[bandit957]

I think GeoCities also had a John Denver tribute page. It was either GeoCities or one of the other sites like that.

Remember NBCi and the commercial that said, "Come on!"?

[bing101]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angelfire


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tripod.com


Wow how two decades have flew by very fast Angelfire, Geocities and Tripod were once the biggest names for blogging in the 90's Dot com boom but Lycos and Yahoo are not as big than they used to be. Two Decades later Geocities and Yahoo are now divisions of Oath/Verizon and Lycos are not as well know as they were in the past.


Geocities had to contend with Reddit, Wordpress and Google's Blogger for taking over the blogging hosting services and yes the App era and Social Media for taking over in the past decade.


http://www.angelfire.lycos.com/

[mgk920]

My old Highway Features of the Week resided in a part of GeoCities for a while, too.

Sad to see them go, but I am also a bit surprised that they were still around.

Now, for a place for some of those strange tribute pages to go and hang out in....   

Mike

[NE2]

It's been closed for almost ten years except in Japan. Ignore clickbait-loving bing101.

[D-Dey65]

A lot of pages on GeoCities, Lycos, Angelfire, Tripod, and such are still trying to hang on. Jeff Saltzman's various pages hung around for a long time after Tripod collapsed.

https://web.archive.org/web/20090830220709/http://geocities.com/SoHo/Canvas/2228/cip/photocip.htm

[Beltway]

My first two websites were originally on Geocites for the first couple years, before I got my own domains.

[jakeroot]

Note only Yahoo Japan is affected by this change to remove Geocities.

That's a bit misleading. Japan is the only one affected, because Japan is the only country that still has access.

[freebrickproductions]

A friend of mine had a GeoCities site years ago, and just a few short years ago I found out it was still up, must've been hosted on Japan's servers without anyone realizing it. Downloaded a bunch of pictures from it though.

[bing101]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tumblr

Tumblr is an Oath owned outlet that does blogging service that geocities once did.

[D-Dey65]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tumblr

Tumblr is an Oath owned outlet that does blogging service that geocities once did.

But I've seen dozens of Tumblr pages die off too.


This is why I reject the myth that "the internet is forever."

[abefroman329]

Of course it's not "forever," it's "only as long as the information is hosted somewhere."  However, it's entirely possible that your content is behind hosted somewhere outside of your control.  The Internet Wayback Machine would be one place.

[formulanone]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tumblr

Tumblr is an Oath owned outlet that does blogging service that geocities once did.

But I've seen dozens of Tumblr pages die off too.


This is why I reject the myth that "the internet is forever."

Nothing is forever, but if the information is deemed to be important enough by webcrawlers, it seems to stick around for long time. Media sites are crawled constantly. A personal webpage with limited other references to it on the rest of the web...not so much.

Anything that became news in the past 15-20 years is duplicated and sticks around in some way. Pre-internet information is a bit more limited.

[vdeane]

I've usually heard "the internet is forever" as a caution against sharing on social media, since anyone could copy it/share it themselves and soon you'd have no idea how many people saved/shared/etc. whatever embarrassing picture you posted.

[kphoger]

I've usually heard "the internet is forever" as a caution against sharing on social media, since anyone could copy it/share it themselves and soon you'd have no idea how many people saved/shared/etc. whatever embarrassing picture you posted.

I usually hear it worded "Facebook is forever", not "the Internet is forever".

[vdeane]

There are other forms of social media, including Instagram, Twitter, etc.  Facebook is just one of them.

[kphoger]

There are other forms of social media, including Instagram, Twitter, etc.  Facebook is just one of them.

That's true.  But that doesn't change what it is I hear people say.

[Henry]

Of course it's not "forever," it's "only as long as the information is hosted somewhere."  However, it's entirely possible that your content is behind hosted somewhere outside of your control.  The Internet Wayback Machine would be one place.

I'm hoping that most of the GeoCities sites that haven't been included in the Wayback Machine will end up there eventually, given the impending closure. Either way, I will most likely have to start from scratch again.

[jeffandnicole]

I've usually heard "the internet is forever" as a caution against sharing on social media, since anyone could copy it/share it themselves and soon you'd have no idea how many people saved/shared/etc. whatever embarrassing picture you posted.

I usually hear it worded "Facebook is forever", not "the Internet is forever".

Doesn't have to be social media either.  If your picture gets in the paper, either as the primary subject of that pic or in the background, that 'Internet is forever' holds true as well.  And that could be for good...or bad (ie: sitting at a café with one's mistress!!).

[jon daly]

Speaking of Geocities, here's an example of what webpages looked like 20 years ago:

http://www.trainweb.org/railnet/

I'm not trying to pick on that pages webmaster (honestly!) I just stumbled upon that page while trying to find something else and the background nearly left me slightly blind.

[jakeroot]

Speaking of Geocities, here's an example of what webpages looked like 20 years ago:

http://www.trainweb.org/railnet/

I'm not trying to pick on that pages webmaster (honestly!) I just stumbled upon that page while trying to find something else and the background nearly left me slightly blind.

Complete with some early noughties music that automatically downloads. Awesome.

[jon daly]

So that's where those .wav files came from.