Many of these sites would not have been possible without the platform to support them or promote them. Geocities in a way was a social network, divided into “cities”, and “blocks”, where you could connect with your neighbors and trade information. When the World Wide Web was still considered to be the “World Wide Waste” by many, Geocities allowed amateurs to produce some interesting and funny content. People could quickly post information on their personal pages and link to it from their instant message programs (an instant message program is sort of like Twitter). In a way, Geocities allowed people to set up a rudimentary blogs, only far far less useable and much more painful on the eyes.
I remember when I first received an Internet connection in 1994. I was 16 at the time. I remember reading the AT&T Internet guide that came with the software for the Internet connection. It talked about how the Internet was divided into several protocols and most of the Internet lived in a series of “threads”. It went on to talk about conversation threading etc. This was a confusing concept for me at the time. This was pre-message board and most of the Internet conversations were happening on Usenet. Usenet was confusing for a 16 year old without any technology training. There was also all this challenging terminology on the Internet which most new users seldom hear or have to worry about anymore. things like pinging, fingering, dynamic vs. static IPs, Gopher, FTP, TCP/IP, DNS, Telnet, Packets, Usenet, NNTP, WWW, Ports, etc.
However, I found Yahoo, a small(ish) directory at the time, (small enough to still browse by categories) and it opened up the web for me. This quickly went from my parents intended use of “The Information Super Highway” for schoolwork and research to where I could find boobs, funny stuff and Doom cheat codes. However, Geocities was something I understood. It was easy. I could link to others I liked and they could link back. Who remembers “web rings”? I met many interesting geeks, and lost my innocence to some of the horrible things the Internet has to offer.
My Geocities website became my collection of the funny stuff I found on the Internet. I remember my first site was complete with a fixed tropical background, exploding gifs, doom characters and everything written in bright red caps. It was seriously awesome.
Later in my college years, with some design experience, I became embarrassed of my pages. I shunned Geocities and my earlier pages. In fact, when I started my professional career, I was scared that someone might even find archived versions of my teen year web pages. Apparently Archive.org never got a hold of my pages, which is probably a good thing. However, in retrospect I hold fond memories of my first webpage and if it wasn’t for a site like Geocities, my web experience and my career could have been much different.
I think I can say for many us, Geocities, you inspired millions of teens to create horrible pages, but you also opened the world to many of us.
Thank you Geocities. You will be missed.
Geocities has been thought of as the armpit of the Internet (now occupied by Youtube comments) in recent history, and maybe thats unfair. Yeah some of the sites sucked, but they were kind of on the forefront of amateur web design and thats a really big thing. Putting the power of creation right in the hands of people is a big deal, no matter what they create.
I’m sad to see it go. I feel its almost like book burning; thats web history that will now be gone forever. We don’t know where we are if we can’t see how far we’ve come.
I personally never used GeoCities. (I was an AngelFire man myself until upgrading to other, better free web hosts) But the influence is far reaching. Yet again, thank you Geocities. You will be missed.
