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Time To Take Down That Animated Under Construction GIF; GeoCities Goes Away

from the a-moment-of-silence dept

Mon, Oct 26th 2009 3:49pm — Mike Masnick

Last week, we wrote about how difficult it is to predict the media landscape future because you don't know what sorts of disruptions will suddenly show up, noting how things like Twitter and YouTube didn't even exist five years ago. Of course, on the flip side, you also have to recognize that things that are big today may not exist in a few years as well. As noted earlier, GeoCities is officially going offline today, despite still getting a ton of traffic (don't ask me from whom). It's just another reminder that what's big today may not exist in just a few years.

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Filed Under: geocities

14 Comments

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Anonymous Poster, 26 Oct 2009 @ 3:58pm

Fare thee well, GeoCities.

Thank you for everything.
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Anonymous Coward, 26 Oct 2009 @ 4:00pm

Geo cities is worth more taking whatever traffic comes in and pushing it off to ad sales than it is as a site. Work out old clutter is one of the many things making search engines less and less useful.
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Anonymous Coward, 26 Oct 2009 @ 4:11pm

Check out today's xkcd.
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Valkor, 26 Oct 2009 @ 4:25pm

Re:
From the broken image links to the showing HTML and distracting backgrounds with illegible text, xkcd absolutely nailed it. Heck, they even used the old school "marquee" tag. All it needs is some blinking text.
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ChurchHatesTucker (profile), 26 Oct 2009 @ 4:41pm

I'll tell you whom
"... despite still getting a ton of traffic (don't ask me from whom)"

Well, since they're just pulling the plug and aren't even willing to hand over directory information, there's four teams (at least) working on archiving what's there: Archive Team, archive.org, Internet Archaeology, and Reocities. I imagine that's driven up their traffic in the past month or two.

Despite its (somewhat deserved) reputation, there's a lot of gold in there. Before Wikipedia et al. that was where you stuck important reference material you couldn't host yourself. If you were on the 'net in the nineties, you know how much of the early history of the web is there.
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MBraedley (profile), 26 Oct 2009 @ 4:52pm

Re: Re:
Uh, I believe the blinking text is covered as well.
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Anonymoose, 26 Oct 2009 @ 5:02pm

And all this time, I thought Geocities just morphed into myspace.
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Chris Maresca (profile), 26 Oct 2009 @ 5:27pm

Re: I'll tell you whom
+! for good content. Among the many gems that are being lost:

- how to deal with SmartStart on Compaq servers
- how to fix your broken Nakamichi Soundspace 3
- Datsun workshop 240Z brake conversion howto
- casting plastics howto
- how to fix your broken dash on a '66 Alfa Romeo Giulia
- flooded battery specs
- homemade cnc router howto
- Jensen FF info page
- detailed parts drawings from several AWD vehicles

And that's just what I had bookmarked. I've saved all of it to PDF...
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Anonymous Coward, 26 Oct 2009 @ 6:00pm

Re: Re: Re:
it is ... but some browsers ignore the blink tags
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Lucretious, 26 Oct 2009 @ 6:19pm

For sheer entertainment value you couldn't do better than Homestead back in the day. They had a link where you could browse random users pages from any where in the world. The Homestead tools allowed you to drag and drop all kinds of garbage from their library....bad games, Horoscopes, pics and, of course, flashing .gifs aplenty.
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Internet Oldster, 26 Oct 2009 @ 6:22pm

It was once the place to be
You young whippersnappers, in the 90s, web space was at great cost. GeoCities allowed a lot of us oldsters learn HTML and display our skills. Free. Even as obnoxious as many sites were, they were a sight for sore eyes after coming out of the BBS days. Give it 5-10 years and YouTube, FaceBook and MySpace will seem old and worn out too.
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Brian (profile), 26 Oct 2009 @ 7:40pm

Re: Re: Re: Re:
Firefox shows the blinking text AND the blink tags, its like an extra special bonus :D
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Alan Gerow (profile), 26 Oct 2009 @ 7:55pm

Re: It was once the place to be
MySpace already is.
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Rekrul, 1 Nov 2009 @ 3:13pm

It's now Nov 1st and a couple of the pages I have bookmarked are still up and working.

There were some good sites there, but I hated the company itself. Every site seemed to have about 2MB of bandwidth per hour. View 3-4 pics on a site and you'd get a message that the site had exceeded its bandwidth.
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