In passing

Today, my Geocities site, and perhaps millions of others' Geocities sites, some of them maintained and others not, quietly passed into history. The directories were destroyed, and any Geocities link now redirects to an offer for Yahoo! hosting.

Thankfully I was able to mirror my two sites in time (as Yahoo! sent all Homesteaders a cautionary email) and the sites now reside in my personal web space. But what of the others? What about that Led Zeppelin tribute website someone built in 1999 in honor for the first time she heard "Kashmir" as a pirated MP3 on Winamp? What about that site owned by a socially awkward teenage boy, who, since everyone else did, tYpEd LiKe tHiS and listed his top three school crushes but had to give them pseudonyms? (And before you ask, no, I did not do this... ^_^) What about what must have been thousands of resumes, hundreds of cookbooks, guitar tab sites, collections of pictures of precocious dogs, family trees, FAQs, tutorials for obscure programs, and the like, whose owners have moved on to other things like Friendster, Myspace, Facebook, and Twitter, or who have forgotten that they even had a website on Geocities? All that information--all that knowledge--is gone.

It would be foolhardy to compare the demise of Geocities to that of the Library of Alexandria. But it was the same kind of loss. Supposedly the Library had knowledge about anything and everything the Western civilizations knew up to that point in time, but groups of individuals who were misguided in their ideology (OK, OK, some of them were Christians) felt that its status as a pagan temple trumped its containing precious human knowledge, and so felt the need to take it down.

Similarly, homesteaders were allowed to post whatever they wanted however they wanted on Geocities, so long as you knew HTML and were willing to type into a text box all day to get it. But with the rise of social networking sites, where people are forced into talking only about themselves (and not what they know, for instance, about matrix algebra or what the Eagles were really saying when you played "Hotel California" backwards), Yahoo! had a change of heart:

However, we have decided to focus on helping our customers explore and build relationships online in other ways. Beginning on October 26, 2009, you will no longer be able to use GeoCities to maintain a free presence online — but we're excited about the other services we have designed to help you connect with friends and family and share your activities and interests. —Why is Geocities closing?

In short, if you want a "presence online" but are not self-centered, then you're going to have to buy webspace.

To me, the closing of Geocities is an end of an era. When I started my "online presence", I came upon pages upon pages of people who were desperately wanting to share what they knew about the world. Now, I'm not saying that the websites were perfect, either; this was a time in the thick of the Browser Wars, before usability guidelines were agreed upon, and so people used rainbow text colors, large animated GIFs, black backgrounds beneath dark blue text (not unreliable markers for goth/emo sites), marquees, website layouts that shrugged off the boundaries of your 800-by-600 screen, frames vs. no-frames, and so on. (And plus, it was never more true then than it ever was that you shouldn't believe everything you hear on the Internet.) But you got the sense that people cared about what they wrote down, and they wanted you to know also. These were the days of free websites, visible counters, webrings, email pals, and the like, where it was the web developers who decided what you learned about, and when we said web developers, we meant all of us. And perhaps sometimes we talked about ourselves.

But the new paradigm--the new ideology--is to share things about yourself. You are the most interesting person you know... why would you not want to write about it? So the Web of today is cleaner, easier to read, more usable for keeping in touch with friends and colleagues, and a whole lot easier to use.

Perhaps it was a trade-off. But at least in my book, we end up on the losing side.

Oh, well, there's still Angelfire. ^_^ (Wonder when these guys will close, too?)

Thanks for reading.

Song in my head: Owl City, "Fireflies". I'm gonna write a "Why I like this song" on this as soon as I have time. But I guess you won't see it on Geocities.

P.S. The title of this post links to my homestead
http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Code/4023
As you can see, you get the nag prompt to join Yahoo! hosting. I told you they're all gone.