Disruptive Conversations

As has been widely reported, Yahoo! is shutting down and deleting all the content from its GeoCities service today. This isn't a surprise, as Yahoo! has been laying the groundwork for the shutdown for some time. And in truth, I'll barely mourn the passing... I haven't intentionally been to a GeoCities-hosted site in years.

But...

..."back in the day", as folks are so fond of saying now, GeoCities certainly was a place where many people got their start with free websites. For those of us online in the 1990's... long before all the zillion sites today where you can go and create your own free site... there was GeoCities.

I had websites running on other servers and never set up my own site on GeoCities, but I certainly knew folks who did and undoubtedly spent time on some sites there. It's amazing on one level that the Yahoo! acquisition was ten years ago... but in recent years the service had definitely been eclipsed and for many of us was more almost a caricature than anything else... (see today's XKCD layout to get a sense of what the site had become like).

Still, it's worth noting the passing, because back in the 1990's, GeoCities certainly did help many people get online. Some articles I noticed today:

• Mashable: GeoCities Closes Tomorrow: Goodbye, Old Friend
• L.A. Times: GeoCities' time has expired, Yahoo closing the site today
• Wikipedia entry on GeoCities

And, as I mentioned earlier, the folks at the XKCD comic changed their layout in tribute:

(P.S. A colleague has pointed out that if you view the source of the XKCD page, it's even funnier...)

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