geocities sings its swan song

Geocities, that place where just about everybody had a site there at one point or another, is going away later this year. Kinda sad. More on that in a moment.

I captured two screen shots (here and here) of the links above when they eventually go dark.

The reason Geocities' closure is sad is because it's one of the very few places on the internet where really old internet stuff survives in its original form. And yes I do mean original. We're talking Web 1.0 all the way here, and not a re-saved archive like Internet Archive.

Yahoo is not simply turning off new Geocities accounts here. No, sir. They are deleting everything:

Later this year we will be closing all GeoCities accounts and web sites. We'll send you more details this summer.

Wow. I can't even begin to imagine how many web pages are in that system. It has to be well into the millions.

Currently the public Geocities search is gone but you can still login with a Yahoo account to get to it, so if you want to experience The Internet That Was, be sure to login and do some searching. It is really easy to find stuff in there that's 10+ years old.

Even though Yahoo is giving several months notice that the content is being completely erased, I guarantee when the hammer is dropped that a bunch of people are going to get really ticked off because they weren't notified. Those that used Yahoo email addresses before may use something else now and not check those accounts. It's not going to be pretty.

I guess it's a foolish hope that Yahoo archives all the stuff and someday makes it public. When it's gone it will probably be gone forever.