Tue, 27 Oct 2009
Will the last to leave kindly turn out the light? / geociti.es
Today is Monday, October 26. Someone at Yahoo will go home tonight and, on the way out, turn off geocities.com.
Update: Tue, 27 Oct 2009 15:17:50 -0400 Geocities is finally offline. Pages say:
Sorry, the GeoCities web site you were trying to reach is no longer available.
To commemorate it, I bought geociti.es. I intend to do what I can to keep the Geocities pages on the web. I am part of the Archive Team, an independent group of amateur archivists racing to rescue the web from destruction at its own hand.
In late 1994, Geocities began offering free web hosting as Beverly Hills Internet. A decade ago, Yahoo bought Geocities. In December 1998, one-third of all web users visited the website. As recently as March 2009, 11.5 million unique visitors arrived there. Today, according to Alexa Site Info, Geocities ranks somewhere between the New York Times and the Washington Post in pageviews. And today, Geocities.com shouts:
GEOCITIES IS CLOSING ON OCTOBER 26, 2009.
Tomorrow, Geocities' website will be closed for good if Yahoo sticks to that promise.
The amount the Archive Team has downloaded is around one terabyte. That's all we seem to be able to reach; many pages were deleted months ago when the archiving effort began. The archiving is continuing as I write this.
Think of it. Fifteen years of history, memories for millions of people, the birth of a generation on the web. More personal embarrassment than all the POG games put together. It fits on an $80 piece of storage equipment -- at least, that's what we managed to find before Yahoo erases it all.
Initially, when I met Jason Scott of the Archive Team, he told me he wanted to download Geocities and share it by mailing hard drives around. I told him I wanted to hoist it back on the Web. He came around, and we and the rest of the Archive Team have put Geocities back online.
Geociti.es is not the greatest website in the world, no. This is just a tribute.
P.S. Major thanks to John Joseph Bachir for the paperwork assist.
