For those of you not into nerd history, you might have missed the significance of Monday, 26 October 2009. Ten years after paying $3.5 billion for the company, Yahoo shut down GeoCities, one of the original web properties and the first ‘social network.’
If you don’t remember or never knew the details of GeoCities, you can check out the wiki page on GeoCities. Not exactly the high point of social networking, but looking back, GeoCities was a great idea, just about 8 years ahead of time.
So, GeoCities is dead, but there are a few folks out there trying to resurrect the old pages, or at least archive them for, well…, I guess for future generations? Anyway, The Internet Archive was working to back up the Geocities sites, as was a new site, ReoCities. I just finished reading this guy’s story, and it’s pretty amazing. He decided on Wednesday to back up GeoCities and make it live again. Pretty amazing stuff. No idea how he’s done, but he claims 600K pages restored.
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{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
Pretty amazing, sounds like a lot of money for that company I don’t think youtube or facebook is even worth that much money!
Can you make that link to http://reocities.com/ clickable ? Good it was a .com
This is coming from a professional user interface engineer. People still aren’t forced to learn xhtml (not xHTML), the type of people who used GeoCities wouldn’t care anyway, and this is far from the “best leap forward”, because nobody cared about GeoCities anyway. And anyway, moving forward, HTML 5 doesn’t follow xhtml standards… whether or not it should (it should).
No, the “best leap forward” would be for the companies holding themselves back because of worry of breaking their intranets to realize that IE8 has a compatibility mode. That, or actually put time into their infrastructure.
RIP Geocities…. who’s next!?
These websites seriously booms in a day and die another day..
I couldn’t figure out what Yahoo saw in Geocities to begin with, their product always seemed kinda hokie to me.