The death of GeoCities
To be honest I thought the free web hosting service GeoCities died a while ago but apparently not as today, after a long illness, it was finally put down by its owner Yahoo!
I never had a Geocities web site for any serious purpose. I would create sites from time to time if I wanted to share some files - always legal mind and then leave the site to become stale and then eventually deleted. The vast majority of web sites on their were projects that would start with great enthusiasm that would quickly give way to apathy. I remember looking for information on West Ham United and finding hundreds of sites that had pictures of players that had long since left and match reports from games long since played. These match reports would start off being full of detail but over time get shorter and shorter as the creator slowly lost interest.
The other notable thing about a GeoCities web site would the bandwidth hogging (this was in the days of slow dial-up modems) animated gifs and embedded MIDI files that would play a horrible tune when you visited the site. Text would scroll and flash all over the place. The flashing, scrolling text and the silly animated gif was the content - that is what you went to see. A bit like looking at a photography of a firework display - ultimately pointless.
Yahoo! bought GeoCities for $3.6 billion. I doubt they ever made any money on the deal but I'm sure it all made perfect sense at the time - a time before the dominance of Google, the creation of FaceBook or broadband speeds able to support a service such as YouTube.
GeoCities did have a social element to it as web page creators were encouraged to talk to one another in forums. With the rise of FaceBook, Twitter and YouTube where updates are near instantaneous, why bother learning HTML so that you can tell the world what you are up to? It is easier to upload photographs to Flickr than it is to resize the images and then create a web page to show them off.
When my nephew was born in 1999 I took some photos of him on the Saturday of his birth and then had them developed at a one hour place on the Monday, scanned them that evening and had them uploaded just before midnight - pleased as punch that it had only taken less than 60 hours to get the photos out to the world.
When my first son was born in 2005 it took the time from child birth to getting home for me to upload the pictures. My son was born just after 8pm and the pictures were up before 11pm.
When my second son was last year I took photos a few minutes after he was born and uploaded them straight to FaceBook using my iPhone.
With this change in how people published their information online the death of GeoCities as it stood was only a matter of time. I do feel a little twinge of sadness that another early Internet brand has gone, a bit like throwing out a loyal pair of worn out shoes, but soon forgotten.