Yahoo Inc is shutting down GeoCities, a free service that hosts personal home pages for consumers, which it acquired for more than $4 billion 10 years ago during the heyday of the dotcom boom.
Before there were blogs, there was GeoCities, the free, “make-yer-own-page” community that molded the late ’90s Internet era with overwhelming high-contrast color schemes, obnoxious designs, and plenty of Baby’s First HTML. People still post that stuff on MySpace, obviously, but Geocities was a trailblazer for incompetency in Web design and, as such, deserves a tribute.
To your end, GeoCities, may we offer a 21-GIF salute.
EDIT: I just re-read the press release. Yahoo paid FOUR BILLION DOLLARS for that crap? Boy, those were better days.
I just lost a few minutes there and now my tongue is bleeding.
I think I just had a seizure.
Oh my GOD, I totally forgot about GeoCities!! Did anyone else pronounce it in their head so that it rhymed with “atrocities”? I always did, and now I remember why.
As horrible as geocities was and is for design, there were all sorts of amateurs who put up great and often obscure information there.
To this day on Google, if I search for things like data on obscure old electronics or cars, I get some geocities pages in the mix. Often they were just some cranky old man who had the schematics or something in his attic, scanned them and uploaded them. When content like that just disappear, we’ve lost something.
Oh shit, I think I still have some shit on a Geocities page somewhere…
Wow Sam you suck at this. Where’s Nicholas when we need him?
Come on, Sam. No fire? No skulls? What kind of GIF salute is this…
yeh pretty shitty gif salute wheres the first punching you through the monitor and the ridiculous 3d “email me” ones
I still remember thinking that Navigator GIF was so cool back in ’95.
thank god i read slog with images turned off during the day … but that is going to hurt when I view it late tonight.
Somewhere there used to be a Geocities page with my name on it. I hope it dies well.
@complainers: It took so long to find 21 Geocities-era GIFs that wouldn’t break Slog with width issues, I just about stopped posting altogether. Who knew those GIFs would be so hard to find? Also, I decided against the dancing banana because it’s a later-era GIF. Feel free to link to your old faves here, fucking freaks.
When I think of GeoCities, I think of infinite pop-up ads whenever you clicked on one of its pages. FUN FACT: Stephen Glass, the writer who fabricated several articles for The New Republic in the mid-90s, used GeoCities to forge a web site for a fictitious Silicon Valley software company.
Snargent, I always pronounced it “gee-OSS-i-tees” as well. These icons are byeootiful.
Wow. What a blast from the past. I’d almost forgotten about Netscape completely. And to think they were the web browser of choice for a few years.
It figures that Yahoo would shut down something that they bought if only because they screw up everything that they touch.
Microsoft had something similar called ‘Communities’ and later ‘Groups’ when the bought out E-Groups. They finally pulled the plug about two months ago.
I had a really nice website 8^(
Well, that sale allowed David Bohnett to fund a major career as a philanthopist: among other things, his foundation contributes a lot to gay causes, and he is currently chairman of the board of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. As bizarre as the tech boom and bust were, here’s an example of someone who got in and out at the right times and has used his good fortune well.
too bad Sam didn’t hotlink images to geocities, as they were the first host to prevent that from happening.
Hey! I have a webpage!
But its under contsruction…here are 20 different under construction gifs…
Hard Hat required! LOL!!!1!!
I wish I could find my page I made in 7th grade… 🙁 I think I wrote some reviews of Baldur’s Gate and put a lot of Diablo gifs on it.
Remember the neighborhoods? http://www.geocities.com/NapaValley/2022…
MobileMe (née .Mac) just pulled the plug on homepage hosting as well.
Hmph. This is my lack of concern.
Sam, you also forgot to mention the embedding of midi versions of “Dixie” or other sentimental tunes that couldn’t be turned off, and were only a minute long, so if you needed to actually read the data on the page (See @3), it would start over. And over. And over.
OK, forgot to close their bold tag. Here:
Did that fix it?
Fuck. Strong?
How about that?
There. Tip: don’t use tags in your Name field.
<BG>
{{{{{{}}}}}}
Anyone remember when <g> was more popular than :)? I always hoped grin would win the emoticon wars. <EG>
really?