Yahoo! has just announced that they will be completely shutting down GeoCities later this year. I was a very early user of the service, and there are a couple lessons I've drawn as an observer over the years.
First is the danger of forcing advertising on your users. To me, this was the start of the slow decline, when the early adopters all moved on and started looking for other services.
But second is the incredible staying power of a large user base. While "all the cool kids" moved on by the late nineties, GeoCities still has an Alexa rank of 149 today, even though they've been providing a mostly sub-par experience for quite a while.
It's one of the best examples of how slowly users can evaporate once you've acquired enough of them, or in non-web speak, that people are resistant to change: once they've found a good way to do something, they tend to keep doing it that way for a while.
Joseph
5/25/2009 07:13:32 am
Bonjour David, labass a3lik ? :)
Joseph
5/25/2009 07:29:21 am
Oh ! and btw, I am sorry I had to post this here, I know it's off topic, but I'll buy you a drink in Casablanca or Paris, how is that with you ? :))
A Geocities User Since 1999
7/18/2009 03:21:41 am
Yahoo has put such a low hourly transfer limit, it will take until October to get all of the files.
Tim
8/30/2009 09:48:00 am
I remember Geocities vividly. For a long time it was the only option for building a free website. Oh well, times have definitely changed... 10/4/2009 12:07:16 pm
I read the other comments and am among other original geocities user's here. My first computer was a Macintosh Performa a friend gave after she finished graduate studies. Wanting always to be a "writer", my passions swept me onto the internet and I began "blogging": before the word was defined at geocities. IT really was the basis of teaching me domain hosting, html, writer's etiquette and even display and CSS style. Comments are closed.
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David co-founded Weebly, an incredibly easy to use tool that helps millions of people create a professional web site, blog or online store.
He was named to Forbes' 30 under 30 list, is a part-time DJ and has traveled to over 20 countries. Investments include Cue, Parse, Exec, Churchkey, Streak, Incident Technologies, Adioso and Zenefits. ![]() Categories
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