My homepage from 1996-199810 years ago (that's 1999 people, had you even heard of the Internet then? If anything defines the dotcom boom, it is this), Yahoo bought GeoCities for over 4 BILLION DOLLARS. This is fucking insane. I never realized this. Now Yahoo has announced that it is shutting down GeoCities for good, sometime later this year.
I was going to write something funny and nostalgic about GeoCities, and how in retrospect it really sucked balls but how like half of my life on the Internet was characterized by using library computers to do WebCrawler and Lycos searches for Super Nintendo cheat codes and Star Wars trivia that yielded poorly formatted GeoCities pages. Instead, I think it's appropriate to reflect on actually how fucking badass GeoCities was for being 2.0 before anyone else ever thought of that shit. It's true. Although GeoCities was/is home to 95% of the Internet's worst HTML, it also is one of the first websites that allowed users to easily create and share their own content with other people on the web. If that concept sounds familiar, it is because EVERYTHING YOU DO ON THE INTERNET TODAY IS EXACTLY THE SAME AS WHAT PEOPLE ON GEOCITIES WERE DOING 15 YEARS AGO. Minus the scrolling text marquees and .gifs, that is. Unless you are still using MySpace. For Science's sake, PS is Web 2.0 as it gets. Thank Science for GeoCities!
In any event, I guess it's time to migrate my My Little Pony fansite from GeoCities to AngelFire. I hear that is the new hot ish...
p.s. I wonder if Yahoo was ever able to recover the $4bill they sank into GeoCities? HAHA WE DOUBT IT. It may have been ahead of its time in some ways, but as far as dolla dolla bills go, the 21st century has got the 1990s beat. Can you say MONETIZATION???
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