In Memoriam: Geocities

I was sad today when I realized it was the last day for Geocities.

Geocities was started in 1994 by David Bohnett and John Rezner. By early 1996, I had my own home page on Geocities. In an excellent LA Times article, Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian states that he “lost my HTML virginity with Geocities.” Me too. All my HTML experimentation happened there.

GeoCities was created so that everyone could have their own little piece of the web for free. When I think back on it, we really didn’t get much space – at least not by today’s standards when 2 GB or more of storage can be yours for free. But back then it was perfect for the small HTML pages we were creating.

GeoCities was divided into neighborhoods. Ohanian’s pages were apparently located in “Silicon Valley.” My pages were mostly located in “Athens.” If I recall correctly, Athens was the place for writers and artists. I had several web sites, spread out across several cities and with several themes, including Celtic poetry, Halloween, Princess Diana, and an online grammar superhero named Grammar Girl. My Grammar Girl site was written up in the USA Today back in 1998. (There’s another, better, Grammar Girl on the Web these days.) Scarily, the Princess Diana page screenshot they’re showing in the LA Times article could have been my own site. I’m not kidding.

I remember my first encounter with online flirting happened via GeoCities. I was involved in the online community of moderators – Community Leaders. I think I helped “patrol” Athens. There was another guy, Adam from Canada, who was also a moderator, who was the object of my flirting. We had message boards and chat rooms we used as moderators, and Geocities gifted us with occasional gift certificates and t-shirts. It was my first experience with an online community. I also see that period as somewhat prescient. Geocities was created on user-generated content, and policed by the users themselves.

By the end of 1998, HTML was evolving and so were my own web design skills. I’d moved on to my own web site hosted out on Dreamhost and while I hadn’t yet abandoned my Geocities accounts, I’d certainly neglected them a bit. It’s about the same time that, according to Wikipedia, Geocities introduced the dreaded watermark.

The watermark, much like an onscreen graphic on some television channels, was a transparent floating GIF which used JavaScript to stay on the bottom right side of the browser screen. Many users felt the watermark interfered with the design of their website and threatened to move their web pages elsewhere. The watermark also had cross-browser issues. GeoCities claimed in a press release that the company had received upbeat feedback regarding the watermark.

I hated that watermark and it didn’t take long, thereafter, for me to break entirely with Geocities and move on and up. I still had my files locally and at the time, it hadn’t even occurred to me to actually take my sites down. They probably remained out on Geocities, abandoned, for quite some time. Yahoo! purchased Geocities in 1999. It should have been a brilliant purchase. But, aside from eventually removing the “city system,” Yahoo! just let Geocities stagnate.

Losing Geocities is, in a way, the end of an era. So many people learned their basic HTML skills on Geocities. Giving each of us our own little piece of the Web back then was brilliant. I updated so often that, in retrospect, I was pretty close to blogging without realizing it. I learned about basic design and I even started to learn what would drive people to my web site. Because of Geocities, I was out in front of a lot of my peers, listing my web sites on my business cards and hosting my resume online.  Learning HTML with Geocities, on my ex-boyfriend’s computer, kept me sane during some turbulent periods back then. It also sparked my own interest and love of technology, which has only grown since then.

My early 20s were a bit of a mess, as were my web sites with their bad graphics and blink tags. But that was a phase I had to go through, and a phase our current Web had to go through as well.

Rest in peace, Geocities. We’ll miss you, and thank you.

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Cheers!
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