How GeoCities Changed the World Wide Web For Us All

Whether or not you had a Geocities account, it's hard to deny the part it played in moulding we way we all use the internet today.

The closing of Yahoo!’s GeoCities service marks the end of a chapter in the evolution of the World Wide Web.

Services such as GeoCities offered the world a web as Tim Burners-Lee had designed it – all of a sudden anybody could stake their claim to their very own corner of the World Wide Web, without the need for in-depth technical know-how, and all for the cost of a dial up plan.

In a world predating Twitter, where the word blog was largely unknown and to own a dot-com was to merely buy into a corporate fad – Geocities gave a voice to those who were previously muted responders, forever blurring the lines between media producer and media consumer.

Within a few short years it became home to millions of tech-savvy users worldwide. It was a place to write down your thoughts, host useful and individualised information on topics of interest and upload countless scanned images, creating a loosely bound collage which peered into the lives of everyday people. It was your very own hyperlink to share with friends and family; and with enough effort – it became your own personal hangout online.

As the web entered into the 2000s and the first emergence of social media and media sharing began to gain popularity. It marked the beginning of the end for the now humbled free D-I-Y website. Services such as MySpace, Flickr, YouTube and blogger offered everything people wanted out of Geocities, with many times the user friendliness, and with the sole object of encouraging social interaction.

With the emergence of these outlets the web changed drastically. People are still uploading the same media, they still stake their claim to the World Wide Web, but this time it is distributed more liberally – and instead we began calling more than one place ‘home’. You’d write your thoughts on your blog, keep up appearances on MySpace, host your photos on Flickr and eventually upload your videos to YouTube and organise your social life on FaceBook. You would link them all together and create your own personal web within an infinitely larger network – not having been exposed to a single line of code.

But it’s all too easy to forget what sites like GeoCities had shown early internet users. Many a budding web designer sought their career after fumbling about the HTML which drove their GeoCities account; and many more went on to realise the internet as a medium to reach out and be heard; to connect and organise and arrange the social artefacts of our lives. So a sincere farewell to GeoCities – one of the most successful online amateur content communities and a thank you for guiding the evolution of the World Wide Web.