Yahoo! shut down Geocities today and the realization brought a tear to my eye. Geocities was my first entryway into online website creation, the digital equivalent of a high school sweetheart from a simpler era. And what a humble experience it was. The site offered a mere 15MB (which couldn’t hold a YouTube video today). But in 1998, it was all I needed.
Long before I ever migrated to the superior Tripod service (50MB, baby!), begged some feisty webmistresses to give me free hosting at pick-me.net, or bought my first webspace at Rydia.net, there was Geocities. I built my first website during one evening in late 1998 using nothing more than Netscape Composer (you know, before they were mercilessly crushed by Microsoft). The site had an ugly layout, utilized a ‘frames’ vs. ‘no-frames’ splash page, and contained really terrible artwork and midis I had discovered online using Metacrawler. But it fulfilled its purpose: I had an online presence.
When Yahoo! took over Geocities in 1999 after essentially flushing $3.8 billion down the toilet, I was forced to place a 200×200 ad in the corner of my site. It was a small price to pay for free hosting. But the relationship was never the same again. The site evolved numerous times over the years and I made a lot of online friends across America through shout boards and guest books (remember those?). Some of them I remain acquainted with on Facebook. Years later, I put all that behind me and bought a domain along with some shared hosting.
The Internet changed with the advent of social networking. Yet so much has stayed the same. We still yearn to create our own space and online identity, whether through a Notepad-coded personal site, or a CMS-enhanced blog, or a Twitter account. Geocities may be gone, but its impact will not soon be forgotten.
Goodbye first website.
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