Yesterday I retweeted a post by ReadWriteWeb concerning Yahoo’s announcement that they are closing down GeoCities this year.
This was particularly sad news for me because GeoCities was where my first website was hosted. Within a day of getting the internet at home for the first time (On December 26th, 1995) I signed up for an account at GeoCities, which was at Area51/Labyrinth/1226 (it’s long since gone so there’s no point in me linking to it here), but that site eventually evolved into The SubspaceLink.
I had a great time on GeoCities back in the 90s, and even was a volunteer for them as part of their Community Leader program, and even had stock in the company (a measly 10 shares, but stock nonetheless).
In 1999, Yahoo purchased GeoCities for about $4.5 billion, and my 10 shares of GeoCities became 6 shares of Yahoo, their stock split twice since then (in 2000 and 2004), so now I have 24 shares of Yahoo, and I still hold today.
Yahoo didn’t waste any time in terminating the Community Leader program (a decision I always thought was a bad one, as the sense of community was what made GeoCities great).
Anyway, this is more rambly than most of my posts, so I’ll probably end up editing or deleting it later, but I wanted to do something fun. I just checked to make sure it’s true but my old geocities email address still works (after all these years), so drop me an email at it at [email protected] so I can enjoy it again just a little bit more before Geocities dies forever.
* The cover photo wasn't actually from any real geocities site, instead it was a parody of GeoCities style fan sites created by Dreamworks for the movie Galaxy Quest. The site has been down for years, but you can find it on the Wayback Machine, Enjoy!