Yahoo! nukes GeoCities Yahoo! is demolishing GeoCities today, a decade after acquiring the ticky-tacky build-your-own-website service for $3.57bn in stock. In April, the company announced plans to raze the service and stopped accepting new users. "We have decided to discontinue the process of allowing new customers to sign up for GeoCities accounts …
Oh, yeah! I caught a load of that, too. Freakin' hilarious. Totally caught the look.
Still, about the archivists trying to preserve as many GeoShitties sites as they can: why? I mean, seriously, in the name of all that's holy -- WHY???
Pint of beer, because many of those old GeoShitties sites looked as if they'd been designed after half a dozen or so were consumed.
I wonder how many netizens now are too young to give much of a damn about Geocities?
For myself, it was a vehicle for my first extremely crap website, but it was mine - it was a home on the web. It's long since been lost to the mist of times, regardless of the current wrecking ball.
It was pretty much the first community (aside from angelfire) which let the "masses" of that era create their own "masterpiece" on the web and as such, deserves a little more Kudos than some of you net youngsters give it.
At the time, it was incredible - you scoff at those "under construction" animations, but back in '94/'95 you were considered an ultimate "no social life" "retard" "loser" if you even knew what a website was, let alone an animated gif!
It took until late '97 for the world to truly catch on to "under construction" animations, by which time, the marketing heads had already got their sticky hands all over the signage.
Ah, those were the days - when frames were fresh, when tr and td tags were some sort of mystical right into a world of extreme geekdom, until then only inhabited by 12-sided dice throwing bearded blokes with no women, or worse still, women with hairy legs.
Many a night spent hand crafting blinking construction themed animated gifs, striving to reduce the file size just that little bit more, just so you could demonstrate to the world that you hadn't yet managed to think of anything to put on your new geocities site, aside from animated under construction signs.
and then... you discovered online porn, way before the word pr0n had been invented - any hope you had of actually creating relevant content for your geocities site was lost as you got titilated by slow loading JPEGs of naked babes... byte by byte - oh God, her nipples just loaded ...
That was the web in the 90's - porn and animated gifs and, apparently, a bunch of angry bearded unix types who played D&D and did stuff on BBS thingies and had something called gopher - nobody paid them much notice and eventually they went away and became billionaires or married women with hairy legs.
... and you tell the kids today about it and they won't believe you!
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Im actually rather disappointed in this......Are they hiring out old GeoCities designers now?
Ok yeah that was low :P
Good riddance to Geoshitties. It won't be missed.
Good riddance to Yahoo too - it's demise is in the post.
For a long time now this worthless excuse for a company has behaved this way. Almost every service they created or bought was scaled back, infested with ads then deleted or closed. Once too often I have had to move all my work to a rival because they keep closing things down. Briefcase, Photos, Groups archives, on and on.
Fuck 'em.
Yes, Geocities was the home of a million godawful websites made by 14-year-old girls with no aesthetic taste (the spiritual predecessor of MySpace in that sense, even down to the prevelance of dated 90s-style non-scrolling backgrounds).
But it's still a shame to see it pointlessly being wiped off the face of the earth. I doubt that it would have cost Yahoo much at all to keep the sites online as an archive.
Yes, there are a lot of them, but most haven't been updated since the early-2000s, so we can assume that their average storage and bandwidth requirements are typical for the time. Likely a few pages of text and 20 to 100 horribly compressed JPEGs - in other words, tiny by modern standards.
Geocities probably uses less bandwidth in a year than YouTube uses in an hour, and I bet you could store its entire contents on a trival number of 1TB hard drives.
If they'd wanted to reduce administrative overheads and to move people away from the service, they could have achieved that by turning it into a non-updatable archive-only site (which it mostly is anyway), letting owners disable/delete or download their files if they actually wanted to.
Heck, I suspect that the small income from advertising on an archived Geocities would still offset the minor inconvenience and cost of keeping it running.
I doubt that removing Geocities from the web altogether will have much effect on Yahoo's bottom line. It smacks of pointless beancounting, pseudo-rationalisation (that some nonentity manager thinks will make them look good) or possibly other esoteric legal/business/accounting reasons related to their balance sheet and tax writeoffs that require them to close the service. It sure as heck isn't because it's costing them anything worth worrying about.
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