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Farewell, Geocities
Oct. 28th, 2009 04:48 pmIt’s been a while since I actually visited a site hosted on Geocities, but I still feel kind of sad that it’s gone. Granted, the sites on it were generally crap, filled with animated gifs, under construction signs and inexplicable lists of people’s CD collections – still, at the time it was really exciting to be able to set up your own website, put your own content out there where anyone could see it – even if the chances of anyone actually stumbling across it was slim to none.
I first used my username to set up a geocities account – admittedly, I never really got around to making a site and mainly used the account to just store images I wanted to link to on message boards. Still, just having the option of being able to create a free website was something that really brought home the potential of the web – which, at the time, was still struggling to justify its existence in the public mind.
I remember reading someone pointing out that the 1990s and twenty-first century could become something of a dark age for future historians; sure, everything’s being recorded somewhere online, but how long is any of it going to last? Geocities being shut down just brings home the ephemeral nature of content on the web; granted, maybe there’s not much value in preserving ten thousand ‘Joe’s Cool Site’ award gifs and non-functional webrings – still, it’s a whole section of online history that’s gone now, and I can’t help feeling that’s something of a shame.
I first used my username to set up a geocities account – admittedly, I never really got around to making a site and mainly used the account to just store images I wanted to link to on message boards. Still, just having the option of being able to create a free website was something that really brought home the potential of the web – which, at the time, was still struggling to justify its existence in the public mind.
I remember reading someone pointing out that the 1990s and twenty-first century could become something of a dark age for future historians; sure, everything’s being recorded somewhere online, but how long is any of it going to last? Geocities being shut down just brings home the ephemeral nature of content on the web; granted, maybe there’s not much value in preserving ten thousand ‘Joe’s Cool Site’ award gifs and non-functional webrings – still, it’s a whole section of online history that’s gone now, and I can’t help feeling that’s something of a shame.