Early Web Era Ends as Yahoo Shutters GeoCitiesA web era came to an end Monday as Yahoo officially boarded up GeoCities, the long-neglected pioneer of personal web pages. GeoCities -- acquired by Yahoo in 1999 for $2.9 billion -- was once on the cutting edge of making it easy for individual users to publish their lives on the web, but long ago was eclipsed by the social-networking innovations of Facebook and MySpace.
In a posting on the GeoCities help page, Yahoo said: "We have enjoyed hosting web sites created by Yahoo! users all over the world, and we're proud of the community you've built. However, we have decided to focus on helping our customers explore and build relationships online in other ways."
Yahoo is pointing GeoCities users to its web-hosting service, which it said offers personalized domain names, matching e-mail, and a range of site-building tools.
Web 'Training Wheels'
"One of my first web sites was GeoCities way back in the day," reminisced social-media expert Chris Brogan in an e-mail. "It was great for giving us training wheels in using the web," said the coauthor of Trust Agents: Using the Web to Build Influence, Improve Reputation and Earn Trust.
"It failed because the mission didn't matter once more robust tools came about. They weren't really good communities to begin with, but they were workable. Yahoo could've killed it five or six years ago and it'd be OK," Brogan added.
The closing underscores a prime concern of web historians -- sites like GeoCities may not contain earth-shattering content, but taken as a whole they represent an important step in understanding the web's evolution. For all those personal pages to be lost would create a hole in the social history of the Net.
Preserving the Early Web
Fortunately, many GeoCities pages will be preserved at the Internet Archive, a nonprofit digital library based in San Francisco. While the archive already hosts many GeoCities pages through its web spider, the organization is now actively encouraging GeoCities users to submit their pages directly.
"GeoCities has been an important outlet for personal expression on the web for almost 15 years," a statement on the archive's GeoCities Special Collection page says. "With the recent news from Yahoo that GeoCities is going to be discontinued on October 26, 2009, the Internet Archive is working over the next few months to ensure our collection of GeoCities sites is as deep and thorough as possible."
The site allowed users to self-organize into communities of interest. In 1998, user pages were organized into "neighborhoods" like Area51 for science fiction, CollegePark for university life, and TimesSquare for video and role-playing games. The site offered tools to build web sites, online chats, and e-commerce tools.
A look at the site in 1999, through the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, shows the site offering this feature topic: "The 70s: Put on your bell-bottoms and ease on down to the disco! Take a trip back to those happenin' years."
The happenin' years of 1999 now seem a distant memory. Ten years later, most web creators think in terms of connecting to other users through Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. But back in the day, the site was a revelation to millions of new web creators. The tools were unsophisticated by today's standards and the results were generally disastrous by any objective design standard, but GeoCities proved there was a market of people eager to put themselves online, not just consume content from the likes of America Online.
http://tech.yahoo.com/news/nf/20091026/tc_nf/69716One last look
http://www.geocities.com/mybeststars/index.htmlVicky Zhao Wei and Alec Su in TV series Old House Has Joy
Swordgirl - Zhao Wei
Divine Retributiion
Lau Ching Wan and Adam Cheng
Fan Bingbing - Homeward Bound