GeoCities is goin’ down!

Down like downtown. I’m gonna whip it so hard..

Oh, I’m sorry. Getting to topic, I got an e-mail in my seldom-used and yet always-messy Yahoo! inbox a couple days ago. Usually the “official” mails are spammy, but this one was interesting. Obviously because it was the official announcement that GeoCities is dying.

I used to use GeoCities, or more like tried to use GeoCities. I remember setting up a site a time or two but truthfully the free options were just too limited. Even fairly recently, the storage space and design options were absolutely paltry in comparison to just about any other free hosting service.

But, on October 26th, say goodbye to another prominent icon of Web history. They’ve already stopped accepting new accounts. The pages on free accounts aren’t going to be archived by Yahoo!. GeoCities Plus accounts will be upgraded at the same price to Yahoo!’s Web Hosting.

The reason I’m bringing this up is that GeoCities really was a prominent hosting service. There’s literally tons upon tons of good information still stored on their free hosted sites. This was the era before blogging, and many people used these pages – even professionals in specific fields. There’s information, even if some of it may be old, that’s really valuable.

It’s also quite the nostalgia trip, in a different way than Internet Archive. Internet Archive separates the pages from the live web, but the sites still hosted are still breathing websites, even if they haven’t been updated in years.

All is not lost though: The Internet Archive has started a concentrated effort using their Wayback Machine to collect, archive, and index as many GeoCities sites as possible before they go offline. If you know of any sites you’d like to keep, check if they’re already indexed, and if not, enter their addresses via the Internet Archive’s GeoCities Special Collection page.

At least this was announced. Unlike some other company.. yes AOL Hometown, I’m looking at you.

I think the plain and simple reason is it’s just not lucrative for Yahoo! to keep GeoCities running. With the Internet the way it is now, free blogging tools, social networking, image hosting sites, and the like, there’s not much reason to have this type of service anymore.

They’re too many other, better free tools out there for “web space” creation/sharing. I don’t think they should close it completely though, but I believe I understand why.

Hurry Internet Archive, hurry!

I bet the sites I made when I was a naive youngster still exist. Heck, I still remember what they look like. If I only remembered the addresses..I’d love to check them out again.

Actually, I just found one of them after logging in to GeoCities but it wasn’t the cool one. I checked the “Last Modified” date and it sits at May 12, 2007. Way more recent than I thought.