back to article Yahoo! nukes GeoCities

Yahoo! is demolishing GeoCities today, a decade after acquiring the ticky-tacky build-your-own-website service for $3.57bn in stock. In April, the company announced plans to raze the service and stopped accepting new users. "We have decided to discontinue the process of allowing new customers to sign up for GeoCities accounts …

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  1. Brian Miller

    $3.57 billion down the drain?

    They paid how much for what to do what to whom for how long??

    I really wonder how many of these aquisitions was worth the price.

  2. Ed Blackshaw Silver badge
    Happy

    Aha

    That would explain today's XKCD with its deliberately bad HTML then.

  3. Trevor Pott o_O Gold badge

    Nothing I could say could top XKCD on this...

    Today is a one-day-only (oh god, I hope) redesign of XKCD's website in commemoration of this event.

    http://xkcd.com/

  4. Mike Flugennock
    Pint

    @ Ed Blackshaw

    Oh, yeah! I caught a load of that, too. Freakin' hilarious. Totally caught the look.

    Still, about the archivists trying to preserve as many GeoShitties sites as they can: why? I mean, seriously, in the name of all that's holy -- WHY???

    Pint of beer, because many of those old GeoShitties sites looked as if they'd been designed after half a dozen or so were consumed.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Alert

    under construction

    Ahhh... flashing gif hell... how we will miss you...

    http://www.textfiles.com/underconstruction/

  6. Marvin the Martian
    Dead Vulture

    @Blackshaw

    Indeed... run the html validator over Xkcd's site and you have hilariously many errors. The code is fantastic, tags like java, web=2.0, plus GOTO statements and all... So nineties.

    Gravestone for geo(slum)cities.

  7. Richard North
    Happy

    @ Ed Blackshaw

    View the html source for a few 'in' jokes too... it's so bad it's brilliant. :-)

  8. LaeMi Qian
    Go

    @Ed Blackshaw

    Yes, it takes a bit of effort to find it, but there is a message buried in all the blinking cruft presently on XKCD that the site's current format is celebrating the closure.

  9. Swarthy
    Thumb Up

    Yahoo!

    For once, their name is appropriate.

    "It's as if a thousand blink tags cried out, and were silenced"

  10. Will Godfrey Silver badge
    Happy

    @Ed Blackshaw

    Yes it was rather a shock to the eyballs, but there was a very subtle hint in the banner :)

  11. J 3
    Coat

    @Aha

    ...yup, that and the big banners announcing the fact along the top of the page.

    Looks funny and nostalgic, but not nostalgic enough for me to want to see sites like that anymore.

  12. Russell Howe
    Happy

    @Ed Blackshaw

    Did you read the page source yet? :)

    <HTML WEB="2.0">

  13. John Dougald McCallum
    Thumb Up

    Yahoo!!!!!!

    WOT no more spam.....I get more spam from web sites with geocities as part of the address than from any where else

  14. Paul RND*1000
    Thumb Up

    I feel a strong disturbance in the Force

    As though thousands of garish animated backgrounds cried out in pain and then were silent.

  15. Jeremy 2
    Happy

    @Russell Howe

    Also this gem:

    <SCRIPT LANGUAGE="QBASIC">IF $BROWSER = "IE" THEN GOTO 50</SCRIPT>

    Some other little titbits in there too

  16. Charles 9

    @Mike Flugennock

    Because Yahoo! sure as ____ isn't. And there's no telling where some significant piece of Net history actually began as a Geocities site...and no way to prove it without the history to look up. I myself used the place for some time before moving on.

  17. the spectacularly refined chap

    Blogspot

    When can we get rid of the other source of a seemingly infinite number of crap websites?

  18. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Too young to care?

    I wonder how many netizens now are too young to give much of a damn about Geocities?

    For myself, it was a vehicle for my first extremely crap website, but it was mine - it was a home on the web. It's long since been lost to the mist of times, regardless of the current wrecking ball.

    It was pretty much the first community (aside from angelfire) which let the "masses" of that era create their own "masterpiece" on the web and as such, deserves a little more Kudos than some of you net youngsters give it.

    At the time, it was incredible - you scoff at those "under construction" animations, but back in '94/'95 you were considered an ultimate "no social life" "retard" "loser" if you even knew what a website was, let alone an animated gif!

    It took until late '97 for the world to truly catch on to "under construction" animations, by which time, the marketing heads had already got their sticky hands all over the signage.

    Ah, those were the days - when frames were fresh, when tr and td tags were some sort of mystical right into a world of extreme geekdom, until then only inhabited by 12-sided dice throwing bearded blokes with no women, or worse still, women with hairy legs.

    Many a night spent hand crafting blinking construction themed animated gifs, striving to reduce the file size just that little bit more, just so you could demonstrate to the world that you hadn't yet managed to think of anything to put on your new geocities site, aside from animated under construction signs.

    and then... you discovered online porn, way before the word pr0n had been invented - any hope you had of actually creating relevant content for your geocities site was lost as you got titilated by slow loading JPEGs of naked babes... byte by byte - oh God, her nipples just loaded ...

    That was the web in the 90's - porn and animated gifs and, apparently, a bunch of angry bearded unix types who played D&D and did stuff on BBS thingies and had something called gopher - nobody paid them much notice and eventually they went away and became billionaires or married women with hairy legs.

    ... and you tell the kids today about it and they won't believe you!

  19. Steve Evans

    @Richard North

    Ooooh, the source!

    Genius!

  20. andrewjg

    in transit

    "as we focus on helping our customers explore and build new relationships online in other ways,"

    Well at least the transition to mealy-mouthed gibberish is nearly complete.

  21. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Up

    @Jeremy

    </HTML>

    GOTO 10

    Fantastic... Who'd have thunk it. The intarwebs run on Basic.

  22. James O'Brien
    Dead Vulture

    TheRegs Source

    Error found while checking this document as HTML 4.01 Transitional!

    1 Error

    Line 429, Column 140: an attribute specification must start with a name or name token

    …computing.org/?pg=registration.html"">Event of the Week</a></span></h3>

    Im actually rather disappointed in this......Are they hiring out old GeoCities designers now?

    Ok yeah that was low :P

  23. Cliff

    @Matt 89

    Holy crap - you are me!

  24. Ian Court
    Pint

    XKCD

    Love the source. My favourite:

    <A HREF="/653/" accesskey="p">

    "I've got a secret website that's so hardcore..."

    Farewell, GeoCities. You were mostly shit really; but it was good shit for which I'll always have an odd fondness.

  25. darren.b
    Thumb Up

    yay!

    Good riddance to Geoshitties. It won't be missed.

    Good riddance to Yahoo too - it's demise is in the post.

    For a long time now this worthless excuse for a company has behaved this way. Almost every service they created or bought was scaled back, infested with ads then deleted or closed. Once too often I have had to move all my work to a rival because they keep closing things down. Briefcase, Photos, Groups archives, on and on.

    Fuck 'em.

  26. sandman

    @Matt 89 @Cliff

    I'm having an "I am Spartacus" moment here as well!

  27. Mage Silver badge
    Happy

    Not all rubbish

    There where (are*) a lot of useful sites on it too.

    (* some appear to be still there on the 27th. Zombie sites?)

    No "under construction" animated gif here?

  28. Anonymous Coward
    Pint

    @MATT 89

    Hear hear :)

  29. David Adams
    Pint

    @ MATT89

    Amen Brother.

  30. I didn't do IT.

    @ MATT89

    I AM SPARTACUS!

    IT just brings a tear to my i. :)

  31. Samir

    Goodbye my old freind

    it helped me make my first webpage i will miss you alot

    http://thetechnologycafe.com/a-tribute-to-yahoo-geocities-a-platform-that-helped-form-the-web/

  32. Michael Strorm Silver badge
    FAIL

    Why didn't Yahoo just archive the whole thing online?

    Yes, Geocities was the home of a million godawful websites made by 14-year-old girls with no aesthetic taste (the spiritual predecessor of MySpace in that sense, even down to the prevelance of dated 90s-style non-scrolling backgrounds).

    But it's still a shame to see it pointlessly being wiped off the face of the earth. I doubt that it would have cost Yahoo much at all to keep the sites online as an archive.

    Yes, there are a lot of them, but most haven't been updated since the early-2000s, so we can assume that their average storage and bandwidth requirements are typical for the time. Likely a few pages of text and 20 to 100 horribly compressed JPEGs - in other words, tiny by modern standards.

    Geocities probably uses less bandwidth in a year than YouTube uses in an hour, and I bet you could store its entire contents on a trival number of 1TB hard drives.

    If they'd wanted to reduce administrative overheads and to move people away from the service, they could have achieved that by turning it into a non-updatable archive-only site (which it mostly is anyway), letting owners disable/delete or download their files if they actually wanted to.

    Heck, I suspect that the small income from advertising on an archived Geocities would still offset the minor inconvenience and cost of keeping it running.

    I doubt that removing Geocities from the web altogether will have much effect on Yahoo's bottom line. It smacks of pointless beancounting, pseudo-rationalisation (that some nonentity manager thinks will make them look good) or possibly other esoteric legal/business/accounting reasons related to their balance sheet and tax writeoffs that require them to close the service. It sure as heck isn't because it's costing them anything worth worrying about.

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