Apr/092
RIP Geocities
Geocities, long forgotten by most of us, is finally shutting down. The Internet, those of us who've been around that long, is sad. It's like the college dorm of the Internet; we all remember our tiny rooms in there and how we thought we knew how to decorate with our tapestries and Christmas lights. It was so important to us at the time. Until you moved into a real apartment where you could smoke without putting a towel down on the door.But still: you feel a tiny flicker of sadness for its demolion and all the good times you had in there.
When I think about, Geocities was actually not my first rental property on the Internet. I'm pretty sure my first web site was the free hosting our ISP (remember actually using that stuff?) gave us. Back then, they were called "homepages." There was a hideous little template where you filled out your name, some text, and added photos that were ganked from other websites (which haha, we still do). Geocities was a step up and getting into the neighborhood of your choice was a really big deal. I remember getting a coveted spot in the Soho Studios, Number 2058. There were discussions about moving from one Geocities neighborhood to another, to one who's address more was more reflective of the unique web person you were. I never moved. SoHo Studios was where I wanted to be. I held on to it, using it as storage while I moved from URL to URL.
It was not an easy task to move a website in those days, even the simple tiny ones we had that were all HTML. You had to go in and change all of your links and put up a clever re-direct page so your 5 obsessive readers could follow you. And we moved a lot. Geocities at first totally free and with a simple banner ad, started to put pop up ads and become a lot more intrustive. There was a big exodus to Xoom, another free host, without ads. And then, a year later, I remember moving from them, too. This continued forever and ever.
What this ending of Geocities does make me realize is, for all our scary talk of how we need to watch what our slutty, drunken selves put online because oh no someone who may pay us to do something might see it, is how not permanent so much of the web truly is. This is why I think talking about the Internet's history is so important. So much of what happened is gone now. We have to discuss it, there's so little evidence of it but our memories and a few pages with dead links.
*The last crawl of my Geocities page, in 2003!