April 24th, 2009 : Goodbye Geocities  

As of today, Yahoo is no longer issuing Geocities accounts and warning current members that their content will disappear from the server “later this year.” For those who don’t know what I’m talking about, Geocities was a virtual empire of free webspace available to the masses launched in 1994 that allowed for the expression of thoughts and interests in what was often very amateurish HTML long before any of today’s social networks. This typically included web pages littered with ticker tapes, auto-start midi music, and animated gifs galore (though if you looked really hard, sometimes you could find a more polished site interface).

The websites were divided into neighborhoods with street addresses based on subject matter. For instance, myself and many other anime fans flocked to places like “Tokyo Towers” and computer geeks nestled into “Silicon Valley.” Geocities’ hayday was in the mid to late 90s when very few services of the sort were available and based on rankings, Geocities was by far the favorite (beating Tripod and Angelfire). In 1999, Yahoo purchased Geocities and everything went downhill from there with many unfavorable changes that made the service entirely unrecognizable to older members. As far as I’m concerned, Geocities no longer existed post-Yahoo, yet today’s announcement has invoked plenty of nostalgia for those of us who used Geocities as our first HTML sandbox.