Yesterday by chance I logged into a Yahoo! Mail account I hadn’t used in a while, and lo and behold there was a notice from Yahoo! that stated GeoCities would be officially closing October 26.
Many of you will think, "Yeah? So?"
The deal here is that it’s a final notice, as in the last one. For anybody that uses GeoCities that didn’t receive it, they won’t get any warning whatsoever that their web site(s) are going to be deleted forever.
I sent a copy of this email over to Jason Scott (he’s big into computer and internet history,) who made a blog post of his own about it. The people who cherish computer history aren’t exactly too happy with Yahoo! these days given their rampage of service closures (Yahoo! 360, Yahoo! Pets, Yahoo! Live, etc. – all gone.)
This at least isn’t as bad as when AOL Hometown got the axe, because now at least with GeoCities, people have some warning outside of a cold, terse Yahoo! notice.
I know some of you are thinking, "It’s GeoCities. Who cares?"
The closure of GeoCities is no different than if MySpace, Facebook or Twitter shut their doors on you. Many of you put a whole lot of effort into those social media sites, and I guarantee few to none of you have any backups of your messages (or anything else for that matter) on that system. If any of those sites closed, you have no choice but to simply lose everything. All your friend connections, all your in-system messages, all the photos, videos and so on – gone.
Kind of gives you that sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach, doesn’t it?
Web sites that are big-n’-social now can turn into a future "GeoCities 2.0," if you will. This is already happening with MySpace. Do you think when they inevitably close that they’ll give anybody a way to back up their stuff? Probably not.
Most people don’t realize that sites like GeoCities, Facebook and everything in between is part of internet and computer history. When any part of it goes away, it usually never comes back. This directly goes against one of the single largest advantages of the internet, that being the ability to store mountains upon mountains of information at the lowest possible cost. But instead of taking advantage of this, we usually throw it away without a second thought.
This is how we treat our own history?
Like what you read?
If so, please join over 28,000 people who receive our exclusive weekly newsletter and computer tips, and get FREE COPIES of 5 eBooks we created, as our gift to you for subscribing. Just enter your name and email below:
RIP Geocities…. what are the alternatives?
This demonstrates another good reason to host your own domain, should you have a serious website or blog that you don’t want to have pulled at the drop of a hat.
(There’s also the professional-image aspect of the situation to consider too. Who do you take more seriously: The blogger with a freebie-pitch on blogspot.com, or the blogger with their own self-hosted domain who’s actually put the effort in to learn how to do it all from scratch?)
Thinking way way ahead; yes there’s tiny a chance that the hosting company who host the self-hosted blogger’s domain could suddenly go out of business too: But in that case the site’s safe from all but at worst a few days’ downtime while the blogger transferrs their domain to a new host and rebuilds from their personal backups they’ve taken.
(Backup, backup, backup: Yes it applies to bloggers too with regard to the data on their server; although possibly not to so great an extent as it does to computer-users with regard to the data on their box(es).)
Yes, indeed Facebook, et al WILL one day be history. It happens to everything. The next big thing comes out and replaces the old.
If they made money at it then they would keep it open. They are not obligated to lose money.
seems yahoo is closing bit by bit, next thing to disappear will be yahoo groups I’d imagine. no one I know uses them anymore and its just spambot type things “posting messages” there.
Yahoo posted this and many other pages about saving or moving your stuff from geocities. The internet archive is saving all they can according to yahoo. Will they have enough time who knows.
Page they have the instructions on here–> http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/geocities/close/close-02.html