Posts Tagged ‘geocities’

End of an Era: Geocities is shutting down on 26.Oct.2009.

Oct 25, 2009 General, Technology

Most of today’s’ internet users may not know what GeoCities meant to internet. GeoCities was simply a “free” webhosting service, which allowed you to upload your own html files (and they will put their ads on your behalf), they gave you a URL, which looked like http://geocities.com/<username> , and you can share your website with your friends family etc, this was all that they offered, just in lines of an equivalent of what blogspot.com is today.

But this is 90’s, there were no Blogs, no RSS, no Web 2.0, and no Social Networking, (I think there wasn’t any CSS too, but not sure). What GeoCities offered was a comprehensive platform using which you can build your own websites, and it was relatively easy if you knew a bit of HTML and were able to tweak some of their codes. Compare it to today, Geocities at that time, was an equivalent of today’s blogger and WordPress put together.

I am talking nine years ago, just the time when I stepped in to my 11th grade. Computer science at that time was not exactly so dependent on HTML, although it was a period of the internet boom, but general knowledge levels about internet and HTML were not that high. And if you wanted to learn something new and latest, you had to get to a library, get a book and learn it, YouTube and Wikipedia were non-existent. And when it came to books on internet programming (I am not joking,”Internet Programming” at that time was not about PHP or ASP.net, it was about creating static HTML pages) almost all of them referred to GeoCities as a starting point, because the website was simple easy to use, almost anyone can put-up their webpage on the net. Geocities was able to offer the ease of use for creating simple web pages. These days we talk so much on this usability, UX and all these things… they were just not existent then, of course, the sites didn’t look good-by today’s standards (you are allowed to call them awful), but they were cool at that time…

Geocities is of a lot of sentimental value for me, for various reasons, this was where I created my first ever website, first learned what is hacking (finding workarounds to disable those crazy GeoCities ads), first came to know about communities, what impact websites could make, this was at a very early age of my life and this to a lot of extent has had an impact on what I am doing today [doing almost the same things in the n'th iteration .. he he :) ].

Yahoo has recently been in a cost-cutting mode, and ideally GeoCities is facing a tough challenge, having lost most of its user base to technologies like Blogger and WordPress. It had to shut shop sometime, time has come now for us to bid farewell to my internet teacher. Let see if i will write some wave or cave, when WordPress/blogger shuts shop in the coming future :)

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