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alexandraerinSo, Yahoo! is finally pulling the plug on Geocities, after years of rumors and email forwarded petitions and so on.
I'm sure a lot of people are like, "Geocities, big deal. Geocities is lame, anyway."... but Geocities was there at the real birth of the net as a global phenomenon, the net as a community... back before registering a domain name and arranging hosting was anywhere near as easy as it is today. They didn't always have intrusive ads and watermarks.
My first web serial was on Geocities. I'm not sure exactly when it was... probably like 1996. It was called "Welcome to Middletown", and I thought of it as a rough draft for the groundbreaking independent comic book I was eventually going to publish. It wouldn't be terribly groundbreaking today. It was about kids in high school, and they were all outsiders: the new girl in town, the geek, the lesbian. I once toyed with turning it into a webcomic with my friend Helen (who drew the Ridiculous Owl Turtle Thing in my icon) and she helped me see that there were some problems in trying to tell these same stories about these same people in high school.
Yeah, that wouldn't have worked very well. I don't know what I have to say about high school anymore. A lot of what I would say shows up in Tales of MU. Like Mackenzie, high school's something I look back at, not something I live.
We toyed around with a few different iterations of the idea fast-forwarded past that point, but it didn't ultimately go anywhere.
My first online community was Geocities' HTML-based chatroom. Not the java applet one that most people knew but the one it replaced. It was a framed page, with the top frame having a text entry form, a pull down menu with verbs ("says", "shouts", "whispers", "giggles", "sighs", etc.), and a pull down menu with targets/recipients. The bottom frame was an auto-refreshing page of text that rendered the conversation in almost-real time. It was slow and kludgy and easily exploited (especially as they allowed HTML and javascript in the text entry form), and the exploitability was one of the things that ultimately led to its demise.
When Geocities announced they were closing them and replacing them with a Java chat... well, this is Livejournal. You folks know how this story goes:
THEY CAN'T DO THIS! WE MADE THIS PROGRAM WHAT IT IS! THEY NEED US! THEY DEPEND ON US! STRIKE! BOYCOTT! THEY'LL BE SORRY WHEN WE'RE GONE!
That's why I can never get too invested in the uprisings and uproars over LJ-doin's. Been there, done that, realized that bidness is bidness and no bidness is going to make it their bidness to appease a vocal userbase of non-paying customers forever. Time marches on. I'm sure in ten years or less there's going to be furious wailing and gnashing of teeth at how commercial Dreamwidth has become.
When the SoHo Loft (the community chatroom that I used) closed down, we all vowed we'd keep in touch and that we'd never use the new Java chats, but I'm sure you also know how that story goes.
But that's a different story. The point of this story is that Geocities was there at the foundation of my internet experience. It was a turning point for me, a hinge on which my life turned, and so I react to this news with a little bit of sadness, but it's not for the closing of Geocities. There was once a need for something like Geocities, but the (program? community? service?) has outlived that need, and what's left is more often than not a bad punchline. It's not my Geocities that's closing. My Geocities belonged to another century.
PCWorld posted an interesting "obituary" of Geocities, which unintentionally raises a bit of a tantalizing What If? scenario. As it points out: "Yahoo removed many of GeoCities' trademark assets, including the 'cyber city' foundation of the service, and attempted to transform GeoCities into a profit-producing venture." It goes on to say, "The proliferation of low-cost hosting options, combined with the increasing popularity of social network-style services in place of personal home pages, only contributed to its demise."
Despite what I said about progress marching on, I wonder if an opportunity wasn't missed there. The aborted "cyber city" (as I recall, they were called "neighborhoods", but I could be wrong) model of Geocities and the community building based around that could have been an interesting model for a social networking site, if they'd stuck it out... if they could have seen what was coming on the horizon and tweaked it a little. Instead, they changed it into an out-and-out hosting service.
Oh, well.
Geocities is dead. I'm alive. More to the point, I'm awake.
Time to work.
I'm sure a lot of people are like, "Geocities, big deal. Geocities is lame, anyway."... but Geocities was there at the real birth of the net as a global phenomenon, the net as a community... back before registering a domain name and arranging hosting was anywhere near as easy as it is today. They didn't always have intrusive ads and watermarks.
My first web serial was on Geocities. I'm not sure exactly when it was... probably like 1996. It was called "Welcome to Middletown", and I thought of it as a rough draft for the groundbreaking independent comic book I was eventually going to publish. It wouldn't be terribly groundbreaking today. It was about kids in high school, and they were all outsiders: the new girl in town, the geek, the lesbian. I once toyed with turning it into a webcomic with my friend Helen (who drew the Ridiculous Owl Turtle Thing in my icon) and she helped me see that there were some problems in trying to tell these same stories about these same people in high school.
Yeah, that wouldn't have worked very well. I don't know what I have to say about high school anymore. A lot of what I would say shows up in Tales of MU. Like Mackenzie, high school's something I look back at, not something I live.
We toyed around with a few different iterations of the idea fast-forwarded past that point, but it didn't ultimately go anywhere.
My first online community was Geocities' HTML-based chatroom. Not the java applet one that most people knew but the one it replaced. It was a framed page, with the top frame having a text entry form, a pull down menu with verbs ("says", "shouts", "whispers", "giggles", "sighs", etc.), and a pull down menu with targets/recipients. The bottom frame was an auto-refreshing page of text that rendered the conversation in almost-real time. It was slow and kludgy and easily exploited (especially as they allowed HTML and javascript in the text entry form), and the exploitability was one of the things that ultimately led to its demise.
When Geocities announced they were closing them and replacing them with a Java chat... well, this is Livejournal. You folks know how this story goes:
THEY CAN'T DO THIS! WE MADE THIS PROGRAM WHAT IT IS! THEY NEED US! THEY DEPEND ON US! STRIKE! BOYCOTT! THEY'LL BE SORRY WHEN WE'RE GONE!
That's why I can never get too invested in the uprisings and uproars over LJ-doin's. Been there, done that, realized that bidness is bidness and no bidness is going to make it their bidness to appease a vocal userbase of non-paying customers forever. Time marches on. I'm sure in ten years or less there's going to be furious wailing and gnashing of teeth at how commercial Dreamwidth has become.
When the SoHo Loft (the community chatroom that I used) closed down, we all vowed we'd keep in touch and that we'd never use the new Java chats, but I'm sure you also know how that story goes.
But that's a different story. The point of this story is that Geocities was there at the foundation of my internet experience. It was a turning point for me, a hinge on which my life turned, and so I react to this news with a little bit of sadness, but it's not for the closing of Geocities. There was once a need for something like Geocities, but the (program? community? service?) has outlived that need, and what's left is more often than not a bad punchline. It's not my Geocities that's closing. My Geocities belonged to another century.
PCWorld posted an interesting "obituary" of Geocities, which unintentionally raises a bit of a tantalizing What If? scenario. As it points out: "Yahoo removed many of GeoCities' trademark assets, including the 'cyber city' foundation of the service, and attempted to transform GeoCities into a profit-producing venture." It goes on to say, "The proliferation of low-cost hosting options, combined with the increasing popularity of social network-style services in place of personal home pages, only contributed to its demise."
Despite what I said about progress marching on, I wonder if an opportunity wasn't missed there. The aborted "cyber city" (as I recall, they were called "neighborhoods", but I could be wrong) model of Geocities and the community building based around that could have been an interesting model for a social networking site, if they'd stuck it out... if they could have seen what was coming on the horizon and tweaked it a little. Instead, they changed it into an out-and-out hosting service.
Oh, well.
Geocities is dead. I'm alive. More to the point, I'm awake.
Time to work.
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no subject
on 2009-04-28 06:26 pm (UTC)And honestly? the death knell of geocities was myspace, because the VAST majority of geocities sites were basically myspace pages. lets be honest...
no subject
on 2009-05-05 12:34 am (UTC)Oh, and hi! I was crawling through old comments on my WordPress blog (http://www.klech.net/blog) and found yours on the post about Howard Tayler being a webscab, back a krazillion years ago. I'm starting reading Tales of MU and finding it very cool. I've thought that an excellent way to do fiction online (and kicking around my own ideas of how to exploit it) for a while now, and I'm very interested to see how it works for you.
no subject
on 2009-05-06 03:50 am (UTC)no subject
on 2009-05-06 04:18 am (UTC)no subject
on 2009-05-12 01:37 am (UTC)no subject
on 2009-05-12 11:54 pm (UTC)