Geocities: no longer under construction | Yahoo

Geocities: no longer under construction

Geocities is dead. Gone. Kaput. It's joined the choir invisible and...

Anyway. Geocities, founded in 1994, was one of the first build-your-own website schemes, one which created a zillion grim-looking white-text-on-black-backgrounds-with-stars efforts, and two zillion "under construction" signs. Yahoo bought it in 1999 for $3.6bn in stock. Joining was free, and you could get a princely 15MB of web space; it's claimed that it was, at one stage, the third most-browsed site on the web. Even this March it still recorded 11.5m unique users - though that had been falling fast, down from 18.9m in October 2008.

If you're feeling nostalgic for the Under Construction signs, by the way, there's a few hundred truckloads to be had at the "Please be patient" website.

And then there's the real effort, by the Archive Team, who have been trying to archive as many Geocities pages and sites as they could. It's not clear how many they've gathered unto themselves, but it's probably the web's best collection of animated GIFs, white-on-black text and twinkly star backgrounds still in existence.

To add to the sighs of relief from a million web designers who never found a single Geocities page they didn't hate (after all, why not replace those blink marquees with a little Flash?), the web comic xkcd has for today - we hope it's only today - gone to a Geocities-themed layout.

Part of the widespread culling going on at Yahoo under the new leadership of Carol Bartz, the demise of Geocities was greeted with a sort of yowling noise when its imminent execution was announced. The attitude was perfectly summed up by the academic Tom Harris, who at Yahoo's UK Hack Day in May said: "They are destroying the cave paintings of the web." Or as our own Jemima Kiss said at the time the killing was announced, "Closing Geocities feels a bit like your Mum making you throw out a manky old toy you never play with any more. As soon as there's the threat of it going, it's suddenly your favourite thing."

Today, Geocities. But what will it be tomorrow? Will we need to launch a lifeboat for Friends Reunited - or for MySpace? And what were your favourite Geocities memories? We'd love to know.

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