Hey… how dare you youngsters ask what is Geocities and what’s so great about it? Heck, this is the service that democratize the internet. Before Geocities come about in 1996, Internet has been around long before but it was the domain of geeks and university scholars (yeah.. geeks as well). But with Geocities, suddenly any Ahmad, Mutu and Ah Beng can have their own webpage on the world-wide-web for all the world to see. Anybody can have a page (something like http://www.geocities.com/~coolashreport) and post information about themselves, pictures of their dog and cat, list of midi-files and other banal stuff.

By today’s standard, the Geocities pages are gawdy. Pages with black background with neon yellow flashing text and oh-so-cool java-scrolling text are common. Why not, even the homepage is… just have a look yourself down here.

What Geocities look like in 1996

Geocities arrranged pages into community with like minded interest. When you register, you need to choose one community to park your homestead (that’s what yet call your pages). “Area 51″ “Beverly Hills” “Silicon Valley” etc. There are other free community pages like “Angelfire” “Tripod” but Geocities are the grand-daddy of them all. At its peak in 1997, it is the 5th most visited sites in the world and hosting 3.5 million sites. Certainly impressive even compared with today’s community sites like Facebook or MySpace.

Geocities demise started when it was acquired by Yahoo! in 1999 for US$3.6 billion. Yahoo! actually paid over US$100 per profile (out of which US$200 is attributed to yours truly). Not long afterward, the dot-com bubble burst and caused serious decline in advertising money.

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• House of Sand and Fog release

It will not be so bad if Yahoo! had let Geocities evolve into web 2.0 and kept up with alternative community sites. Instead, Geocities remain trapped in the time zone.

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Cyworld. An example of what Geocities could not become

The picture above is from Cyworld, a leading Korean social networking site. The site is targeted at teens and 20-somethings – people who have time to create networks, homepages and 3-D virtual rooms. Users can buy virtual items to decorate their 3-D rooms. A staggering 25% of the Korean population have an account with Cyworld. Cyworld is now in Japan, China, Taiwan and USA. And it’s profitable too – bringing in a cool US$300,000 a day.

This is what you can do in Cyworld:

• Create your own 3-D room in pixel art
• Create a pixel art avatar of yourself
• Fill your 3-D room with virtual items
• Slick and cute interface
• Photos, videos, journal, sketchbook, file storage, etc. all integrated
• Add friends as “neighbours”

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Now that’s cool. And if Yahoo had the vision to transform the 3.5 million homesteads and get the teenage and 20 somethings to buy stuff for their virtual world, we would not have abandoned our Geocities pad. Actually we can say the same thing to Yahoo! the classified-listings turned search-engine too.

So here’s an ode to Geocities – the grand-daddy of webpages. And as a rememberance, here’s a typical Geocities page for you. (for obvious reason, I can’t put up my own Geocities page or I’ll be the butt of joke of the office for the next ten weeks

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RIP Geocities!

P/S : Don’t be shy, please leave here the URL of your geocities pages before they disappeared in October.