No More Geocities

After all of the hubaloo about Tripd.co.uk going down, another major player in the free homepage market is coming to an end. Geocities, one of the first homepage providers has announced that they are no longer accepting sign-ups and will be shutting down by the endof the year.

Long time visitors (are there any?) will know that this site started off at Geocities, back in 1997. At the time, they had a different approach to to website categorization – that of neighborhoods. So, all of the sites about games would go in the TimesSquare/Arcade neighborhood. After that, everyone had a number (7891 for me), much like your homepage was an apartment on the block. You could browse sites by streets and addresses and check out your virtual “neighbors.”

Perhaps it wasn’t the most useful way to organize sites, but it was an interesting interpretation of how these homepages should be structured and really showed off some of the early unique approaches to the internet at the time.

Eventually, Geocities succumbed to an overload of ads and pop-up banners and was bought out by Yahoo!. The old neighborhood categorization was gone and instead replaced with the more standard geocities.com/username approach.

Most people, however, seem to know the place as a location for horrible web design with pages that say little more than “Welcome to my corner of the internet. Here is a list of my favorite links.” Maybe time hasn’t been so kind to the site, but I’ll have fond memories of the place, figuring out this whole html thing and looking at the random homepages of my geo-neighbors.

In other news, the I ’76 FAQ has been reordered and had some parts rewritten, just to explain things in a tad more detail and offer clearer solutions.

Updates:
Interstate ’76 FAQ – Reworded and reordered