The End of an Era - The Death of Geocities

I was saddened to get an email last night announcing the end of Geocities. For those not in the know (or too young to remember), Geocities was the first free hosting service that made it possible for absolutely anyone to create their own website. Not only could you upload your own HTML files, but it had a WYSIWYG editor that you let users create web pages with no knowledge of HTML whatsoever. Geocities grouped users' pages into communities (cities) that were grouped by themes or interests and visitors could easily jump around between other sites/pages within all of Geocities. It was also one of the first large sites to have ads running down the right hand side of the screen although you could turn them off.

Geocities was eventually bought out by Yahoo! and now, finally, they are moving over to Yahoo's own hosting service at a charge of $4.99/month. Pages that aren't switched over to the new service or another hosting site will see their digital doom in October, 2009.

With the advent of MySpace and Facebook and other professional networking sites like LinkedIn, many people use them as their primary web presence and don't feel the need to develop their own standalone site. The benefit of networking sites is the more people can find your information more quickly.

Still, it is with a sense of nostalgia and a bit of sadness that I bid farewell to my old friend, Geocities. Now if I could just remember the password to go get my old pages off their server...