RIP Geocities
I couldn’t let today pass without marking it in some way – though certainly not as expertly as XKCD has done.
My first ever web presence was on Geocities, and I can still remember the excitement of having contributed something on a global level in a way few people had ever done before. As time goes on and the web relentlessly increments its version numbers, it’s important to remember how significant and emotionally impactful this was for the first ‘mainstream’ users of the web.
Geocities – with its free accounts, easy page creation and ‘anyone can be a web publisher’ attitude – is a shrine to that, and in a way it is the first ever global, virtual ruin. A reminder of how innovation is an evolutionary process.
When Yahoo! bought it it was already one of the web’s running jokes. In less than a decade, its naive, optimistic attitude and steadfastedly Web 1.0 attitude had become hopelessly out of date, and it didn’t even have the geeky elitism of Usenet and IRC or the early adopter community of Livejournal to redeem it.
So RIP Geocities. I can’t help feeling something should go permanently in its place to mark the occasion. Preferably surrounded with BLINK tags…
(I can’t remember the exact URL of my Geocities site, but I remember it was in the Area51 ‘neighbourhood’, that it had a purple background, and orange text, all achieved through judicious use of TD, TR, BGCOLOR and FONT FACE tags.)
Update: xkcd has now taken down its tribute; sorry if you missed it
