This Monday, Yahoo
shuts down Geocities. Oh God, now where will I go for those "site under construction" signs?
Just google for "Geocities" and click on the "News" tab and be prepared to be surprised at just
how much news Geocities made back in 1997 or 1998. Actually, with Google's "Timeline" feature, you can go all the way back to 1990-91 - but that just throws up some archived newspaper pages containing Geocities links, probably ads.
Here's an interesting abstract from an archived article in the LA Times from 1996:
"The site is called Geocities (http://www.geocities.com). It exists solely to make money from our natural human instincts to puff out our chests, announce that we are here and what we say can make a difference.
The Santa Monica-based company offers free access to an Internet tool set and a mapped address book that lets Web "homesteaders" create a page in a "community" of their own choosing.
Then Geocities makes a business out of it by inviting advertisers and commercial vendors to market directly to these specialized neighborhoods, by offering deeper Web services to individuals and through transactions."
Funny, I always thought Geocities pages simply existed to stab us all in the eye with their HTML and occasionally puncture our eardrums with a self-launching MIDI interpretation of the Geocities page owner's favorite '50s tune. (For some reason, it was *always* a '50s tune.)
Can we count on Father Time to make social networking sites go away in 2019?