Farewell, Geocities

[Jax]

Well, guys, it's currently ten minutes to October 27th on my clock, and I'm counting down the minutes to the final breath of what was an icon of my day and probably some of yours. Before Freewebs and sometime after Angelfire, what did everyone and their mothers have? Yahoo! Geocities.

Back in the late 90's and early 00's, everyone made webpages on Geocities. No joke, either. If you didn't have a domain of your own; if you weren't ~*~indie~*~ enough to use Redrival, Envy.nu, or Virtue.nu; and if you weren't n00bish enough to go back to Angelfire or Tripod, you had a Geocities site. And why not? It had the most space any of the free servers offered, and its ads were reduced to a tiny box in the upper right-hand corner (before it got obnoxious with pop-ups and side frames and whatnot). It had bandwidth limits that were at least higher than Angelfire's, and it came with not only an easy builder for the HTML illiterate but also an organized and easy-to-use document manager that enabled kids to write webpages right online. On top of that, it had all kinds of free stuff. Counters, graphics, guestbooks -- you name it. It's no wonder probably 75% of all the anime sites out there were on Geocities back then.

But alas, all good things come to an end, and Geocities is getting cleared off Yahoo!'s servers tomorrow. No more simplistic HTML sites. No more awesome anime fansites that haven't been updated since 2004. Nada.

So, for those of you who are old enough to remember the whole thing, how're you feeling, and did you do anything to prepare? Did you have websites on there that you ran back and grabbed (like I totally did)? Did you do a little happy dance at its sinking?

I mean, on the one hand, I figure it's about time because no one uses Geocities (or, for that matter, visits Geocities sites) anymore. On the other... Geocities! I'll miss you! ;_;

[Mizan]

Goodbye Geocities. I never knew you that well but it's a shame to see such an Internet Icon go down like that. Even xkcd celebrated or mourned the loss of Geocities. I guess Yahoo is just giving up on the thing then. :/

No, I don't have any old websites seeing that I wasn't really active on the Internet, apart from some other stuff, until like three years ago probably.

Farewell, I barely knew thee... ;_;

[Mitchman]

Hopefully someone else saw how awesome xkcd was for geocities yesterday.

[Mizan]

Hopefully someone else saw how awesome xkcd was for geocities yesterday.
I did. It made my computer really laggy because it's old. But still farewell. It's nice that xkcd gave it a proper send off.

[Jax]

Hopefully someone else saw how awesome xkcd was for geocities yesterday.

This is exactly how I was reminded about Geocities closing the other day. XD (I mean, I knew Yahoo was going to be doing it, but I didn't know until then that they'd finally settled on a chopping date.) It was utterly fantastic because, yeah, it looked exactly like some of the pages out there back in the day. (Most usually avoided the godawful backgrounds, though.)

But as for Yahoo, their reason for pulling it is because they're working on different ways people interact with the internet and can't keep making it free. Which is kinda contradictory, but you know, whatever. (Since when did Yahoo make sense anyway?)

[Mitchman]

Yahoo sounds like madness so yeah its not supposed to make sense! AH! Now I know why geocities sounded familiar. When I was a wee lad(6-7 years old) I used that and some site called zanymania or some crazy thing. It had this create a creature thing and you went around playing games. My first MMO.

[Dragonfree]

To be honest, I won't miss it. I really haven't visited a Geocities website since 2003 or so, and I can barely remember those I did. (Even then, none of them were good; perhaps by the non-Serebii/Pokémasters standards of the time, but that, sadly, is not saying much.) And it got on my nerves even then because I hate forced ads and, alas, back then Firefox was called Firebird and nobody knew it existed. :/

[Jax]

(Even then, none of them were good; perhaps by the non-Serebii/Pokémasters standards of the time, but that, sadly, is not saying much.)

Yeah, a lot of Geocities sites weren't that great. (I say a lot because there was this one called Team Rocket's Refuge. Pretty, surprisingly well-made, and it had some interesting content. Mostly fanfic and fanart, but still.) But it was the campy kind of bad, where a viewer might know it's bad, but they still go back to it because it's got a lot of charm. Or hilarious fanfic and/or attempts to be flashy.

But yeah, the forced ads weren't attractive, although the tiny box was manageable compared to pop-ups and the crap Geocities had at the end of its life. (Really? An entire frame at the side?) That and Geocities had a pretty godawful limit on bandwidth that caused the site to go down for the rest of the hour if you tried to look at an entire image gallery. Still, it was sort of campy.

[An-chan]

All in all, missing Geocities is something like missing your old teachers. You wouldn't meet them anyway, but knowing they're gone makes you feel sad, because it feels like a part of your past has vanished. An era has ended, and there's no possible way of ever going back. I know it's sort of stupid to cry after something you haven't used for years anyway, but... Well, it still makes me sort of sad. Nostalgic-sad is still sad, right?

So, yeah. Against common sense, I do miss Geocities. Back when I really started to use the internet (because we got a cable connection), Geocities was the The Thing, not everyone used Google, and I was really proud because our family used Netscape instead of the generic, stupid IE. I was young and arrogant... It's not like it was "a better time", or anything, but it's always sad to know something that was so big is gone.

Like my chemistry teacher. *sigh* May she rest in peace. (That was also a great pun, because she was rather plump. Or, well, shaped like a ball. But she made fun of it herself, so...)