Network purging of Geocities sites

[The Master]

As a result of the Geocities closure Speculative Vision will be purging all Geocities addresses from the Resource Network over the coming week. If you have a site listed please update its address to a new, permanant address as soon as possible.

[The Master]

Geocities is gone Purging of these now dead links resulted in the removal of around 360 links from the Resource Network.

The death of these kinds of free services is a tragedy but not entirely surprising. In the early days of the internet Geocities provided a spectacular service that allowed "regular folks" to make websites. Then the ads came to pay for it. Then the ads got even more aggressive as ad revenues fell all over the web. The hosts became ever more intrusive, using frames and floating ads and similarly annoying features on people's sites in an effort to make it profitable. Once upon a time I had a couple Geocities pages, but I abandoned them long ago...before the sale to Yahoo actually...because Speculative Vision had, quite unexpectedly, become popular.

Then came the social networking of Web2.0. Vanity pages on Myspace, friends lists on Facebook...heck services like Digg even replicate much of what the Resource Network does! These things make Geocities type services seem obsolete, and perhaps they are. After all, web hosting costs have fallen dramatically. You can register a domain name cheaply, and find low cost hosting that provides nearly unlimited space.

I salute Geocities for its significant contribution to the Internet and its culture. It was the first introduction to web presence for millions of people, millions still used it (I believe I read that it was still the 16th highest traffic domain), and it will surely be missed.

RIP Geocities.