GeoCities was a pioneering Web hosting service, one that offered millions a place for self-expression for over a decade. Built during the mid-to-late 90s, it was later acquired by Yahoo!, who announced in April that it would be permanently shuttering GeoCities on October 26th.
Like MySpace for 1997
As TechCrunch put it, “Long before MySpace, Geocities was known as a place where teenagers, college students, and eventually others could impose their own garish taste upon the rest of the world.”
Today there are some big advantages to the sites that have replaced GeoCities: social networking sites allow for greater privacy, blogging tools make a writer’s life easier, and photo sharing sites are tailored to photographers. But the importance of GeoCities in the context of Web history is touted by many, even if it has become a backwater of the Internet today.
The GeoCities Preservation Project
So how will all the old school “user-generated content” of GeoCities be preserved?
Yahoo, Jimdo, and others have offered up their paid hosting services to GeoCities users, but there’s a fundamental problem at work there. The same sort of non-technical person interested in GeoCities is unlikely to want to switch to another host.
Thankfully everyone from niche sites like the FanHistory wiki to the Internet Archive has since stepped up to help GeoCities users beat the rapidly approaching deadline. Be sure to check out the resources at FanHistory and the Archive to learn how to help out.
How AboutUs Can Help
As for AboutUs, while we aren’t a Web host, our site is a great tool for describing websites hosted elsewhere and creating lists of connected sites. Our wiki-based site might be a good place to help further catalog the former GeoCities sites which have since been distributed around the Web.
Part of the beauty of GeoCities was the fact that it felt like more than a hosting company: it was a community, an ecosystem of sites. Once the content is migrated, AboutUs might be the perfect place to list top sites according to topic or affiliation with GeoCities.