When Yahoo! Inc. shuttered the free web hosting site Geocities this past week, the explanation given by the company was a classic example of uplifting corporate euphemism: ”We have enjoyed hosting web sites created by Yahoo! users all over the world, and we’re proud of the community you’ve built,” an information page explained. “However, we have decided to focus on helping our customers explore and build relationships online in other ways.”
But behind this statement was the wholesale destruction of hundreds of thousands of websites, many of them over a decade old and representing some of the first general user sites to come online. Not created by experimenting technical wizards or forward-thinking companies, these sites were hand-made by regular folks – people who had heard there was a thing called the Internet and they should consider buying a modem and getting on the bandwagon.
At a time when full-color printing for the average person was a dollar-per-printed-page proposition and a pager was the dominant (and expensive) way to be reached anywhere, mid 1990s web pages offered both a worldwide audience and a near-unlimited palette of possibility. It is not unreasonable to say that a person putting up a web page might have a farther reach and greater potential audience than anyone in the history of their genetic line.
But putting a website online was often a difficult experience, requiring access to a server with a IP address, a knowledge of operating systems and programming, and in some cases paying significant money and fighting uphill for negotiating domain registration and hardware purchases.
This changed as companies such as Geocities, Tripod and Angelfire joined what became the dot-com boom and started offering these services for low cost, and eventually for free. From a widening field of competitors, Geocities rose up to be the dominant player, with hundreds of thousands of accounts and an enviable webrank – in 1999 it was estimated to be the third most browsed website anywhere on the internet. This success, built on a volunteer force of hundreds and an ever-growing userbase, had allowed Geocities to go public, and ultimately be bought by Yahoo for a still-staggering 3 billion dollars.
Tuesday 1 December 2009
On Geocities ☀
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