Geocity-states
Geocities has been sacked. Visiting a former Geocities site pulls up a Yahoo error page:
Sorry, GeoCities has closed.
According to the Archive Team, Geocities had this:
Yahoo’s Site Explorer showed 23M html pages in Yahoo’s index as of April 29th, 2009.
23 Million pages, now “closed”.
So, thankfully, some good folks out there sprung into action and began doing a deep crawl of the Geocities data. That sounds about as pleasant as it probably is; which is to say, not very.
Thanks to them, we can now be tourists at the ruins of a once mighty empire: http://www.geocities.ws/ & http://www.reocities.com/ & http://geociti.es/
Commence the outrage!
We are losing a piece of internet history. We are losing the destinations of millions of inbound links. But most importantly we are losing people’s dreams and memories.
— @adactio
These people are going to be hella fucking pissed when they find out that you took their stuff down, deleted it, and then hit the hotel bar by 4. They’re going to want their stuff back.
— ASCII
I think to most people (read: not web-developer nerds), this whole thing is kind of a joke. “Geocities, that’s so old!” they hypothetically chortle. Geocities’ legacy is hard-to-read text on star backgrounds and the <blink> tag. For reference, the XKCD tribute was pretty dead-on—I’m linking to a picture of it because I don’t think you can get to the actual page anymore (irony!).
And I think that’s partly right. I’ve practiced the slash-and-burn strategy with my own Web crop enough to know that this stuff is rarely missed. But then again, nobody reads what I have to say. That stuff on Geocities? @adactio did the math:
Wishing the best of luck to the Wikipedians in updating ~39679 links.
— http://twitter.com/adactio/status/5175124422
Yeah it’s not all Babylon 5 tributes. People actually referenced stuff on Geocities.
Oops.
The web is still really new. Google and Wikipedia and Twitter are all babies in this thing. Heck I get downright nostalgic about the “All Your Base…” meme and that’s only a few years old (before people used the term meme ). It’s not that I think the content was alive and thriving on Geocities, it’s that it represents how the web has grown and when I look back…I don’t see too much progress.
Geocities can/will not be repeated in the world of Web 2.0. Web 2.0 is all about swoosh Ajax and social integration, or whatever. Geocities is the old way of doing things. But does old necessarily mean “worse?”
Comparing the two methods of publishing:
Geocities
I got free web hosting. I wrote some HTML and then uploaded it. It wasn’t a lot of space, but did I really need it? I know HTML because this is the new-fangled World Wide Web and how else do you make stuff for the WWW.
Web 2.0
I could get a VPS shared hosting cloud-shard-slice. If I want Free I could get a Tumblr or a Blogger or a WordPress (.com, not .org) or something else. There are a lot of options. But let’s say I went with the VPS cloud-host. I can just download and install WordPress (.org). I just need to make sure I have the MySQL database setup and PHP installed and piece o’ cake. And nobody calls it the World Wide Web anymore. Now we call it “The Internets.” It’s kind of a joke, get it?
So which is the more complex one there? One gives me a big free blank canvas with freedom to upload images and HTML as I please. With the other I have to manage a CMS that might have security holes and theme hooks and a lot of other things that I don’t understand. Tumblr and Posterous are awesome, but they are opinionated about what my very own personal publication should look like. Here is a blog. That’s all well and good…if I want to publish a blog. What if I want to publish a page about Romani Culture and History? Where’s the free and open venue for just publishing stuff?
Geocities is gone and I’m searching my brain and I can’t think of one product that proudly says, “Here is a free blank space. Go wild. Use <marquee>.”
Progress!
