Yahoo! GeoCities is closing. This is in interesting story for a few reasons. Mainly it signifies the end of the model of offering free sites to users with simple advertising money for the host. Now sites are usually a part of a bundle with other services, like premium email.

Those who are looking for free sites usually have more of a specific need for it. Want a social network, use ning. People create their own blogs on Blogger or WordPress. Even the GeoCities need for simple ‘about me’ type sites have been replaced by MySpace and Facebook.

As second reason I find this interesting, is I once had a GeoCities page. It was an open forum called the “Bored Board”. I was lazy so I simply setup the GeoCities “guestbook” feature. Remember those? Instead of “sign my guestbook”, I placed some text at top saying, “Feeling bored? Post as link, start a conversation, or just read.” It really caught on. It was so simple, but people found it addictive. It ended up being a long stream of mini posts, where you checked in to see what was up with this group of people. In fact it was basically your wall in Facebook, or a Twitter stream. It didn’t have all the bells and whistles of Facebook, there were no XML feeds (this was 1997), but it was cool.

So today I’m feeling a little nostalgic. Yes GeoCities quickly became a joke with its bizarre ads, and lame URLs. But it did last. I wasted a lot of my 10 monthly AOL hours on GeoCities sites and had I fostered the idea, who knows, maybe I could have grown it into Facebook.
Did anyone have a GeoCities site, or maybe you still do? That would be cool in a retro way.

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thoughts by bill breen