Friday Firsts: RIP, Geocities

It was with heavy heart that I read Computer World’s report that internet icon GeoCities was not merely decommissioned but deleted outright earlier this week. I confirmed with my own visit to the site, www.geocities.com, only to be greeted with a somber message: “Sorry, GeoCities has closed.”

What is GeoCities? you ask, and what kind of Friday First is this? Well, chock-full-of-questions reader, I’ll tell you. If you are a nerd and/or geek of just about the right age, that age where you’re just making the transition from young to still-young-but-not-quite-as-young-anymore, GeoCities was a first, and a big one.

Webhosting was prohibitively expensive in the 1990′s, and websites were generally purchased by big businesses who were just branching out into the internet. When GeoCities hit the scene, offering free, easy-to-build homepages structured into “neighborhoods,” that all changed. Suddenly, any nerd could post his X-Files fan fiction, or cheat codes for Doom, or just a simple “this is me and who I am” page, peppered with “Under Construction!” animated gifs. It was awesome.

Your Uncle Fat Dude is feeling a little nostalgic today, and it’s not just because his third decade on this planet is a little more than a month from coming to a close (now accepting gifts and cash!). I remember building my first homepage on GeoCities. I couldn’t tell you what “neighborhood” it was in, or exactly what I put there, but I do remember how epic it felt, to type a few words and paste in a picture, and know that it could be instantly viewed from all over the world.

I feel lucky, privileged, to have lived to see the infancy of the internet, to have played my infinitesimal part in it, and to see it grow to the world-altering tool it is today.

So, this Friday, I pay respect to the provider of my first website, and one of the first companies to proclaim that the internet is for everybody. I’ll miss you, GeoCities.