I Miss the Old Geocities

Filed in archive Wish List for Web Hosting on February 23, 2010

How many of you remember the days when Geocities was set up to resemble the world? I do. I thought this was a fabulous concept. I could start a websites and it could be hosted in Paris France. I felt like I belonged to a community and I was in a part of the world I always wanted to go to.

In reality the sites were all hosted in the same place, wherever Geocities was located, and I didn't really get to go to Paris. Still, I liked the idea.

Then along came Yahoo!. First they took away all the countries and cities of the world and made Geocities a plain, boring everyday Web hosting site. Then, they closed. Thousands of people formerly displaced from their cities around the world are now homeless.

Geocities used to be the single most popular place on the Web to have your Web site... now it's gone.

Maybe, just maybe, another web hosting service will see the brilliance in the old concept and bring it back to life. I can only hope.

The image for this post is brought to you circa the Way Back Machine from 1998. This tool lets you see a page on the Internet the way it looked in a specific time in the past.

This is a small part of the list of places or groups you used to be able to chose from when you joined Geocities. There's Paris, among others.