Many observers decided to comment on this event, though very few actually waxed nostalgic. PC World said good-bye in the form of a long obituary and noted that “we forgot you still existed.” The Register covered a related story by mocking the usual style – or lack thereof -- of Geocities pages. CNET, TechCrunch, Vnunet.com, and many others wrote a few paragraphs about Yahoo's move.
It certainly excites mixed feelings in some circles. As The Register, tongue at least halfway in cheek, observed, Geocities contains “Nearly two decades worth of blinking text, animated gifs, fanfiction, and broken links...This is the personal internet young, raw and blemished - before big blogging services and social networking sites arrived to completely homogenize the space.” It's like watching your junior high and high school pictures get consumed by fire. Good riddance, right?
Well, maybe, and maybe not. Jason Scott, owner of the ASCII textfiles blog, kicked off a project to archive Geocities shortly after Yahoo's announcement. He hopes to preserve the sites that will otherwise be lost – the ones that haven't been updated in a long time, whose owners may be dead or have simply forgotten them. These sites would probably not otherwise be backed up. Why is he doing this? For more or less the same reasons the Register poked fun at Geocities.
Scott understands why many would have no problem with Geocities' disappearance. “Many pages are amateurish. A lot have broken links, even internally. The content is tiny on a given page. And there are many sites which have been dead for over a decade.” But there's more to Geocities than thousands of ugly sites, he notes: “...for hundreds of thousands of people, this was their first website. This was where you went to get the chance to publish your ideas to the largest audience you might ever have dreamed of having. Your pet subject or conspiracy theory or collection of writings left the safe confines of your Windows 3.1 box and became something you could walk up to any internet-connected user, hand them the URL, and know they would be able to see your stuff. In full color. Right now....it’s history. It’s culture. It’s something I want to save for future generations.”
Scott is also discovering some potentially useful technical history. He turned up the structure originally used for Geocities' neighborhoods, tracked down how these eventually acquired suburbs, and saw how each “homestead” fit in. It scaled oddly, he noted, but it did in fact scale. And then Yahoo came along and integrated Geocities, adding a third structure. By this time the neighborhood/suburb model was starting to fall apart anyway, with web sites being slotted into neighborhoods that made no sense for them, given the themes.
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