If you happen to be one of the early adopters of the Internet, chances are high that you might have come across at least one whacky Geocities' hosted website. The once dominant, free web hosting service was home to the first websites of a host of users - who later became techies and moved on to other platforms.
In fact, even before the term "blogging" was coined, Geocities was the place to be back in the 90's if you needed a place to voice your opinion - in your own maverick style, of course! Geocities pages was the MySpace of the 90's with the a plethora of absolutely whacky user web sites complete with an overdose of primary colours and glittering text hosted on it.
Originally created by David Bohnett and John Rezner back in 1994, Geocities was bough by Internet giant Yahoo in the late 90's in an astronomical $2 billion dollar deal. That was in 1999.
Fast forward to 2009 and almost 10 years after the buyout, Yahoo seems to have had enough and is on the verge of shutting down Geocities. It was in April 2009 that the first signs of Geocities breathing its last came to fore. Yahoo just gave its users a hint that the service will be shut down and that people might want to "relocate" their stuff to other locations - preferably Yahoo's own hosting service. While they had not given a last date back then, three months later, Yahoo has finalized Oct. 26 as the day when one of Internet's most used, and loved website goes offline. Forever.
To state that Geocities is a part of the world wide web history would be an understatement. As CNET writer Don Reisinge said that the closure of Geocities is definitely marks the 'end of an era' - and we can't help but agree. But life goes on! So long old, friend!
No comments:
Post a Comment