Today is a momentous day in the history of the web: GeoCities is closing down. Some sites such as xkcd have done special tributes which may or may not be available when you read this page (but trust me, xkcd’s was spot-on.)
I never had a GeoCities site, instead opting to use a tilde site and later my own domain name… but I certainly had friends who established themselves on GeoCities. The whole city concept is a throwback to simpler online times; you’d choose to home your site within a city, and each city had its own theme – like Hollywood for entertainment sites and so forth. I also recall that GeoCities started doing all sorts of wacky stuff, like framing in an entire site (which is now standard practice for Digg and Facebook), having fixed ads on screen, and other little annoyances.
As always, Wikipedia has more information. I’ll spill a cup full of blink tags for GeoCities today.
Posted in Technology