Alicia Cermak

Back in April, Yahoo! announced they’d be shutting down GeoCities on October 26th, 2009. When I heard, I was immediately filled with sadness, mixed with an odd feeling of nostalgia. I spent much of my day reminiscing about the hours I spent working on my various GeoCities websites, (the most popular being http://www.geocities.com/area51/shire/5641/ -  Leesher’s Star Trek Page launched in 1996, later known as Leesher’s Sci-Fi site, and finally as Leesher’s Page O’ Stuff) dipping my toe in the HTML waters and learning how to optimize graphics for the web, changing my layout monthly (if not weekly). During the days following the big announcement, I spammed my friends and tweeples with links to embarrassing graphics and old content. I shared memories of being a Notepad purist, and staying up til 6am creating buttons for my site in Microsoft Paint after my Fireworks trial had expired. After a week or so, thoughts about my old sites went dormant again, but I put that last day of GeoCities on my calendar so that I could pay proper tribute to the service partially responsible for where I am today.

Fast forward to yesterday. I will hesitantly admit it was a tough one for me. I spent much of the day distracted by twitter - checking for status updates, looking for old Area51 neighbors, reading tributes, laughing at xkcd’s spot-on GeoCities style layout, confusing my Facebook friends with status updates about some ancient MySpace thing they called “GeoCities”, and following the progress of the incredible archive projects. By the time 5pm hit, I spent several hours looking for the scrap of paper I wrote all of my old GeoCities URLs on in 1999, a race against the clock to get to my old data before 12am PST. Once I had resigned to the fact that the paper must have gotten lost in the move, I moved on to mourning the loss of the GeoCities community as a whole, and joined the archive project IRC channel. The chatter continued through morning, as the sites didn’t go down as planned, allowing the harvesting to continue long past the 12am deadline.

I guess what upsets me most is that (like it or not) GeoCities is part of our internet heritage, and we’re crapping all over it. As embarrassing, and silly, and just plain BAD as some of these sites are, they’re part of our history, and without the GeoCities community, the internet wouldn’t be the same today. Due to the nature of our digital communication methods, we’re losing a little bit of our history every second, but this one could have been avoided. Yahoo! isn’t a charity, and I understand the economics of the decision, but you have to stop to wonder if they realize they’re destroying an internet time capsule, and whether they care. They didn’t try to sell GeoCities, they didn’t give their users the ability to easily save their old files, hell, they wouldn’t even tell archivists just how much data they were trying to save. It’s as if Yahoo! just assumed they could pull everything down and no one would notice or care.

As I write this, GeoCities is still alive and kickin’, giving the archive projects more precious hours to complete their work. Godspeed archivists, godspeed.

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