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GeoCities
In Japan, a free webhost. Outside of Japan, an often-mourned free webhost
Summary
GeoCities is where the Internet threw up. Started as a free webhosting service, GeoCities hosted numerous (millions upon millions) of web pages, often containing atrocious designs and amateur everything. Chances are you got your start on the web by browsing GeoCities for hours, playing with mouse trails and other DHTML trickery, while your eyes were destroyed by yellow text on a black background.
Since anyone could create pages (either manually or with a WYSIWYG editor), the designs were often awful, especially since many of them were created when the web was in its infancy. One would frequently encounter MIDI loops embedded into pages, mouse cursor trails, Comet Cursors, and a multitude of animated gifs.
Origins
| 1994 GeoCities founded as Beverly Hills Internet |
| 12/15/1995 Beverly Hills Internet renamed to GeoCities |
| 05/1997 GeoCities begins to include advertisements in its users' pages |
| 08/1998 GeoCities goes public |
| 01/1999 Yahoo! purchases GeoCities |
| 07/1999 Yahoo! allows custom URLs based on usernames |
| 2001 Yahoo! introduces premium paid service |
| 04/23/2009 Yahoo! announces its intent to close down GeoCities |
| 10/26/2009 In most countries GeoCities is closed permanently. The service is now only offered in Japan |
Current status
Outside of Japan, GeoCities has been closed and its users' sites are no longer available. Archive.org and various other projects have backed up most of the content to prevent Yahoo! from completely eliminating a large portion of internet history.
Facts
- Offered free hosting throughout its entire lifespan
- Everyone had a GeoCities page. Everyone.
Images
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 Many Japanese Geocities pages say "Sorry, Japanese only" |
Related Pages
External Links
You can find additional websites here.
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