The closure of Geocities

Earlier this week, Yahoo closed Geocities.

Geocities was a free website hosting company, launched in 1995. The servers comprised of virtual neighbourhoods and blocks, where pretty much anyone could have their own website. If your website was music based, your neighbourhood would be sunsetstrip. Sci-fi sites went into Area51. You then had your own block under there ie www.geocities.com/sunsetstrip/3635 (sunsetstrip ftw).

Most geocities websites comprised of bright text, centred over a dark background, with transparent tables, animated gifs, marquee tags and horrible MIDI tracks. My first site was on geocities! It was horrible, ugly as fuck, and as a full time web developer I'm embarrassed by it. But that doesn't stop the closure of Geocities being a terrible idea.

So what if there was a lot of rubbish on there? There was also a lot of useful information and a lot of memories, too. How many old tech manuals were on there? How many broken links have Yahoo created by removing Geocities? How many Geocities websites were created by people who have since died?

It's a piece of history, and a reflection of the state of the Internet at that time. Yahoo should at least have made a proper backup or snapshot of the site, but all they did was point archive.org in the right direction and say "get on with it".

As Jason Scott puts it: "Help me save Geocities. Not because we love it. We hate it. But if you only save the things you love, your archive is a very poor reflection indeed."

More awesome Jason Scott speak here.