You probably noticed that Yahoo rather ignominiously killed off GeoCities this week. That probably didn’t matter a whit to your life, though, which illustrates why they did it as well as anything could. GeoCities has long since been rendered irrelevant by Blogger, Facebook, WordPress, MySpace, Twitter, Last.fm, and the whole world of what’s commonly called Web 2.0. If you’re like me, your primary mental picture of GeoCities is of acres and acres of ugly websites (which, unfortunately, spawned imitators such as SiteRightNow that are still around, helping people build bad GeoCities knockoffs).
As Slate points out, though, that undersells GeoCities. For all the disaster it became (especially for Yahoo), GeoCities had the right idea. In fact, it was ahead of its time. (That may have been the problem—it was too far ahead of its time for its founders to see the right way to implement its core idea. They did the right thing, but in the wrong way to produce long-term success.)
GeoCities deserves much more credit than we give it, because it was the first big venture built on what is now hailed as the defining feature of the Web 2.0 boom—”user-generated content.”
The company’s founding goal—to give everyone with Internet access a free place on the Web—sounds pretty mundane now. But GeoCities launched in 1995 (it was originally called Beverly Hills Internet), when there were just a few million people online. Back then, the idea that anyone would want to carve out his own space on this strange new medium—and that you could make money by letting people do so—bordered on crazy. (Two other free hosting companies—Tripod and Angelfire—started up at around the same time, but they proved far less popular than GeoCities.) In an early press release, David Bohnett, one of GeoCities’ co-founders, hailed the idea this way: “This is the next wave of the net—not just information but habitation.” Look past the tech-biz jargon, and his prediction is startlingly prescient. Today, few of us think of the Web as a simple source for information; it’s also a place for dissemination, the place where we share life’s most intimate details. In other words, it’s for “habitation”—and GeoCities helped start that trend.
This is why one insider commented,
Had they done things right with GeoCities, there would be no Facebook, YouTube or MySpace.
Unfortunately for them, though, they didn’t, because they only got half the picture; they missed what seems, in retrospect, to be the obvious corollary of their big idea.
The site came upon one of the chief ingredients of Web success—letting people put up their own stuff—but was missing what we’ve since learned is another key feature: a way to help people find an audience for their daily ramblings. The main difference between GeoCities and MySpace is the social network: Both sites let you indulge your creativity, but MySpace gave people a way to show off their pages to friends. On MySpace, your site was no longer shunted off to some little-traveled corner of the Web. Instead it was at the center of your friends’ lives—and so there was some small reward to keep hacking away at it. At least, that was true when MySpace was hot, which is no longer the case—just like GeoCities, it lost cultural cachet to newer, better sites that came along after. In this way, too, GeoCities was a trailblazer, the first example of another reality of user-generated sites: They’re extremely susceptible to faddism. You want a page on GeoCities or MySpace or whatever else only if other people are there too. As soon as the place becomes uncool . . . everyone leaves in droves.
The result is best summed up by T. S. Eliot:
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.