Way back at the beginning of Internet time, the best thing you could get free was a Geocities account where you could build your own web site. Millions of people did just that. About 38 million, according to Macleans.

Geocities began in 1994. It will close officially on October 26, 2009. Fifteen years is quite a ride.

According to Wikipedia, Geocities was once the 3rd most popular site on the web. It was used for everything. I used it with my web design students as a free place for them to practice making web pages. Many fan fiction sites used Geocities. Sites for displaying or storing photos were popular. For many people, Geocities was the entry point to the web and the genesis of the concept of a web community.

Yahoo paid several million for Geocities in 1999. Now it is closing the doors and urging all the users to migrate to a paid Yahoo hosting account. Advice on doing that is available at the Yahoo help center.

In March 2009, Super Jive declared "Geocities: so wack it has become cool again." Her endorsement wasn't enough to save the site. The death of Geocities was announced in April.

AV Flox mourns the end of the Geocities era with this There is Always a City.

Perhaps more than places of residence, spaces online are like lovers. We enjoy many people who touch our lives, but there are only a number of them that really change us so deeply, and teach us so much, that we remember them forever.

In a sense, GeoCities was that. It may not have been the moody codependent relationship I had with Diaryland, or the drama-filled, torrid affair I had with LiveJournal or the wild, no-strings-attached fling I’ve been having with Wordpress, or the warm marriage I enjoy on this self-hosted blog—but it shaped me.

Maybe it was my first crush.

Bunnykins commented in Wow–Geocities is closing down that old favorites will be missed.

I know that other free hosting like geocities closed down but I never expected geocities would close down. I think part of that has to do with a lot of the sites I still go to use geocities. Like a few anime sites I go to. Although I will admit some of those sites have not been updated in years so will probably not be moved to another location. I will end up deleting at least 50 book marks that use geocities, I will watch to see if they move though.

Geocities sites were mostly amateur productions. Some were pretty awful: scrolling, blinking, multicolored nightmares. As Laura Scott compared MySpace with it, "MySpace, which is so chock full of hideous personal pages it's really the web 2.0 version of Geocities." So did ktsasis in this comment on a MySpace article:

MySpace so much reminds me of the internet 10 years ago ... when everyone had an Angelfire or Geocities page. Those companies weren't able to translate their member base into cold hard cash, so it will be interesting to see what News Corp. does with their investment.

Instead of lamenting the loss, others scramble to preserve what was there. Many active users will probably take up Yahoo on its suggestion to migrate to an inexpensive (but not free) Yahoo account. Others, like Den of the Ogress plan to preserve sites by copying them. She wants to save the romance writers who used Geocities.

If you know of any old Geocities romance website that you'd hate to see vanish, let me know too. Maybe I'll create an online museum of sorts where folks can visit these pages even after Geocities close down.

The Internet Archive has plans, too. Nothing that appears on the Internet ever really goes away (a lesson some have learned the hard way) and the Internet Archive is part of the preservation process.

Yahoo! announced that it will close the site on October 26, 2009, steering users towards their paid service instead. We have been archiving GeoCities sites for years in our crawls, but, as goes with the territory of being web archivists, we want to make sure to gather as many of the pages as possible before the looming end of an era, 10-26-2009. If you have a page with GeoCities or are a fan of a particular page, please use our special collections page to ensure its preservation. Additionally, please refer to another independent project, the Archive Team, who is working to save cultural information that may be lost with the site closing. Yahoo! is also offering valuable advice at their help center.

Free web hosting sites are common now. Blogs are free. Social networks such as Ning are free. Companies like Weebly offer free site building tools and free hosting. MySpace, Facebook, Twitter: the list of free goes on and on. After 15 years of being free, Geocities is finally saying free doesn't work. Free isn't sustainable. Is this an omen, a warning that Blogger and Wordpress and My Space and Facebook should heed?

Geocities tried the same model that Facebook and other free services use now. Advertising. It wasn't enough. It isn't proving to be enough for former print media giants to survive online, either. Internet users continue to demand free. Sites struggle to find a way to provide free and succeed. The Internet has evolved exponentially in the last 15 years, but free hasn't. We keep searching for a way to make free succeed. Will free evolve or is it an endangered species?

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Virginia DeBolt

BlogHer Technology Contributing Editor
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