This past summer I wrote about how Yahoo was going to finally shut down Geocities this fall. That day is finally here, and the internet will never be the same. Life will go on, of course, but early web adopters will no longer be able to amuse themselves by looking back at their earliest web creations.
After 15 years (it was launched in 1994), GeoCities had long been irrelevant and outdated. Had it been in the hands of Microsoft or Google, it might still exist as an archive. However GeoCities had the misfortune to be owned by Yahoo, once a formidable combatant in the search engine wars that is now clearly past its prime.
Sure, there’s always archive.org, but due to the fact that few GeoCities sites ever received any notable traffic, the majority are not likely to be found there. And yea, GeoCities’ old rival Tripod still exists, but it’s not really quite the same, is it?
There’s not much more to say that I haven’t already said. You may have been old and feeble, GeoCities, but we’ll always look back fondly upon the good ol’ days. RIP.
