RIP GeoCities 04/23/2009
 

Yahoo! has just announced that they will be completely shutting down GeoCities later this year. I was a very early user of the service, and there are a couple lessons I've drawn as an observer over the years.

First is the danger of forcing advertising on your users. To me, this was the start of the slow decline, when the early adopters all moved on and started looking for other services.

But second is the incredible staying power of a large user base. While "all the cool kids" moved on by the late nineties, GeoCities still has an Alexa rank of 149 today, even though they've been providing a mostly sub-par experience for quite a while.

It's one of the best examples of how slowly users can evaporate once you've acquired enough of them, or in non-web speak, that people are resistant to change: once they've found a good way to do something, they tend to keep doing it that way for a while.

 


Comments

Greg link
04/25/2009 01:00

I was also a very early user of this service. It's a shame to see it go. I will have to download all of the content I put up all those years ago. (Yes, the site I made is still up!)

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Gil link
05/04/2009 06:37

One part obstinacy and one part lethargy; It's a good observation about the power of entrenchment. Despite the speed of information, old habits die hard! As a would-be entrepreneur, it is a great reminder.

So long GeoCities. Au revoir.

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Nathan link
05/07/2009 16:08

Geocities... Man, that brings back memories of getting dead link after dead link on the Yahoo directory.

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Dany link
05/08/2009 02:33

Yes this is to bad now is souvenir...

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Joseph
05/25/2009 14:13

Bonjour David, labass a3lik ? :)

Est-ce que tu peux aider un casablancais ? je crois que je devrais plutot dire: "veux-tu" aider un casablancais :), car pour ce qui est de pouvoir, tu le peux certainement puisqu'il s'agit en fait d'acheter un nouveau nom de domaine pour un de mes sites que j'ai realisé sur weebly. Le problème c'est que je n'arrive pas à entrer en contacte avec une personne de l'equipe "weebly" pour répondre à mes questions concernant l'hébérgement et le nom de domaine lui-même.
S'il te plait David, aides-moi à franchir ce pas car vraiment ca fait au moins 2 semaines que cherche ca et la, pour trouver un moyen..to get in touch with somebody from the weebly team, and I was really disappointed!
Waiting for your reply David, ne m'oublies pas s.t.p, 3endak tensani !

Thank you so much mate !

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Joseph
05/25/2009 14:29

Oh ! and btw, I am sorry I had to post this here, I know it's off topic, but I'll buy you a drink in Casablanca or Paris, how is that with you ? :))

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A Geocities User Since 1999
07/18/2009 10:21

Yahoo has put such a low hourly transfer limit, it will take until October to get all of the files.

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Tim
08/30/2009 16:48

I remember Geocities vividly. For a long time it was the only option for building a free website. Oh well, times have definitely changed...

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DJ Choppercat link
10/04/2009 19:07

I read the other comments and am among other original geocities user's here. My first computer was a Macintosh Performa a friend gave after she finished graduate studies. Wanting always to be a "writer", my passions swept me onto the internet and I began "blogging": before the word was defined at geocities. IT really was the basis of teaching me domain hosting, html, writer's etiquette and even display and CSS style.

It struck me though that most of the original GEOCITIES populace was dark, rhyming pages of gothic demise and bad poetry. Will miss it so.....

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