StarDestroyer.Net BBS

Before Twitter, before Facebook, before MySpace - heck, even before Friendster, there was a service known as GeoCities. For those who grew up on the Net in the 90s, it was about as close as you get to what we know today as social networks. It was essentially an organization of like-minded user-created homepages in different topical communities like sports, entertainment, and tech.

Yahoo bought the company near the peak of the dotcom bubble for more than $3 billion, which, along with the rise of alternative services, quickly spelled the end of GeoCities’ prominence. Today, it appears that the end of GeoCities is being made official, as Yahoo has closed the service to new accounts and posted an FAQ with some details as to how the shutdown will go.

It’s certainly not surprising that GeoCities is shutting down, as Yahoo has been in cost-cutting mode for months and the service would seem to have little fit in its current business. The company offers a fairly generic explanation of the move: “We have decided to discontinue the process of allowing new customers to sign up for GeoCities accounts as we focus on helping our customers explore and build new relationships online in other ways. We will be closing GeoCities later this year.”

If you’re not familiar with GeoCities, Wikipedia has a fairly comprehensive overview of its rise and fall. But if you are familiar with it, it’s official end is certainly a bit nostalgic. I can still remember the URL of my GeoCities page (a Geocities Page of the Day, no less!), though somewhere between Yahoo acquiring the company and me going to college, it disappeared. In any event, share your favorite GeoCities memories in the comments!

Crossroads Inc. wrote:Um, as someone who has an ancient Geocities website... how can i transfer it FAST before i loose a bunch of old stuff????

Crossroads Inc. wrote:Um, as someone who has an ancient Geocities website... how can i transfer it FAST before i loose a bunch of old stuff????

General Zod wrote:Now if they could just nuke all those shitty Angelfire and Tripod pages still hanging around.

Isil`Zha wrote:

General Zod wrote:Now if they could just nuke all those shitty Angelfire and Tripod pages still hanging around.

Gah, those were worse then the "Geoshitties" sites.

I haven't seen either of those in a long time either.

They still crop up from time to time when I google for something. Removing them would make my search results much less cluttered.

Seggybop wrote:Geocities was always crap, but it reminds me of a time before the internet was filled with an enormously greater amount of far worse crap. Despite its uselessness, I'll probably miss it a bit when it's completely gone. Oh well, there's always archive.org.

Isil`Zha wrote:hah, I remember when Geocities sites were everywhere... and I remember how shitty it was.

99% of the sites I ended up on that were on Geocities had at least one of the following problems:

1) The site was just very poorly done.

2) Horribly slow and unresponsive.

3) "This page no longer exists!"

Can't say there's anything I'll miss about it.

Darth Wong wrote:

Crossroads Inc. wrote:Um, as someone who has an ancient Geocities website... how can i transfer it FAST before i loose a bunch of old stuff????

Copy it onto your local computer ASAP. You can find a new host at your leisure. Didn't you already have a backup?

Destructionator XIII wrote: Look how far the web has come since then. Now we have so many new ways to display obnoxious crap people ten years ago could only have dreamed of*!

* Yes, I know most this stupid shit existed back then too, but at least few used it.

General Zod wrote: You forgot Myspace. Myspace is the Geocities of the 21st century.

Akkleptos wrote:Hmmm... I remember those. But I still use my starmedia orbita account from 1998 to host my SDN signature and post pictures... There's also a site there, but it hasn't been updated since... I think 1999 (I don't recommend the lame thing).

[EDIT: Nothing happened in Y2K, BTW]

Granted, it doesn't have anything that even remotely resembles "speed", but it's been there the whole time, and it doesn't nag about hotlinking or anything, AFAIK.

General Zod wrote:Photobucket will do the same thing, except better since it's a dedicated image host.

LMSx wrote:And then just for nostalgia I tried my ezBoard account. Oh, the early 2000s.

Akkleptos wrote:Hmmm... I remember those. But I still use my starmedia orbita account from 1998 to host my SDN signature and post pictures... There's also a site there, but it hasn't been updated since... I think 1999 (I don't recommend the lame thing).

[EDIT: Nothing happened in Y2K, BTW]

Granted, it doesn't have anything that even remotely resembles "speed", but it's been there the whole time, and it doesn't nag about hotlinking or anything, AFAIK.