GeoCities closed down quietly in October - the end of an era!

I was strangely moved by a blog post I came across on TheNextWeb.com about the demise of GeoCities. Millions of people, small companies, clubs and organizations around the world made their first babysteps into web publishing at GeoCities, including many in Africa. Now, as of October 26 2009, the service no longer exists and all those websites have been taken offline. It's the end of an era, with a rather unceremonious finish.

I was never fond of the advertising-laden "free" hosting of GeoCities back then, and indeed one of the reasons I set up Kabissa in the first place back in 1999 was to provide African organisations with a space on the Internet where they could host their web presence without being beholden to advertising that is mostly irrelevant to their lives. Nevertheless I feel a certain nostalgia about that era when ordinary people started creating their first websites, and can't help but feel sad about all that old content (useless as most of it might be) being gone now or only accessible through Google Cache or the Internet Archive. (At least when Kabissa shut down our server this past Spring, we helped every single one of our domain customers to migrate to other services, be it to another traditional website hosts or online services like Google Apps or Weebly)

To read more about the demise of GeoCities, check out the blog post Top 10 Reasons Why the Closing of Geocities is Long Overdue which lovingly and humourously lists (with wonderful screenshots) 10 annoying, outdated features of GeoCities: homesteading, 15 megabytes, spam, color choice, abandoned web pages, under construction, splash pages, homepage banners, MIDIs, animated gifs.

Ghost Pages: A Wired.com Farewell to GeoCities is also very interesting reading, with many saved pages to illustrate the sorts of pages one was likely to encounter on GeoCities.

This cynical comment on the post about GeoCities on TheNextWeb.com gave me pause:

Too bad Yahoo! removed the Geocities File Manager login months ago and many of us were unable to save our files.

To hell with Yahoo!, Google, MSN, and News Corp. They spent a decade buying up smaller networks so they could implode them all, forcing users into social-networking and blog hubs.

Free webhosting is over. ISPs cap bandwidth, quadrupling paid rates since 2000. They call it a 2.0 internet now, but the true revelation is a corporate-controlled and gov regulated “Internet-2″ is rising.

1984.

Whoa. I wouldn't go quite that far. Yes, Yahoo! purchased GeoCities and allowed it to go down - and now uses it to direct people looking for free hosting to their Web Hosting service. It's true that many successful online services were acquired in this way and then allowed to fail. However, I'm not sure GeoCities would not have retired eventually anyway, given the evolution of the Internet.

I also would agree with the cynical commenter that there are downsides to big companies like Google and Yahoo are increasingly controlling our Internet presence. We need to be alert to this and work actively keep our independence. On the other hand, given how powerful the social networking and blogging platforms are for connecting us and letting us (also in Africa) join a global conversation, I'm not sure it's such a bad thing for "free webhosting" to be over.