Geocities - NicheInterests/mistfunk GitHub Wiki

In the early days of home internet access, we could all appreciate that the WWW was the next big thing coming just around the corner, but it wasn't necessarily easy or obvious how to get your content (ANSI art? Try taking .GIF screenshots! What do you mean, it's larger than a single screen?) on to the Web. Many home internet service contracts didn't include web hosting, or other providers may have offered it for shell account users but only wizards could figure out how to actually use it. Many early websites were hosted by university students on academic webspace (eg. Superunknown was at csusm.edu, California State University San Marcos -- which reminds me of a story about [rad.edu] for another time) but what would happen to them when said students hosting the sites graduated?

Filling the gap until major providers consolidated and horned in to monopolise the hosting action was Geocities, busily giving away virtual plots of real estate in different simulated neighbourhoods themed after famous world-class cities. In the vein of earlier computing idealists such as the People's Computer Company in the '70s, Geocities had a questionable business model of turning everyone into small beans webmasters with free space they provided, then ... ??? ... = profit! (I guess the idea was that the whales among the webmasters would run up against the limits of the free hosting, and upgrade to paid plans served by their existing host, along the way paying for the costs incurred by all the freeloaders. I guess they had their payday in 1999, when Yahoo! -- still limping along with business model problems of their own -- bought Geocities for nearly 4 billion dollars, nothing to sneeze at.) (Yahoo shrewdly demonstrated their "business model problem" acumen by immolating their $4 billion investment ten years later. Jason Scott convoked the Archive Team to save as much of it as possible, some of it up at Oocities, but there are no hard numbers on just how much knowledge (and just how many animated "under construction" banners) was lost in this millennial Library of Alexandria-calibre destruction of unique records.)

Angelfire and Tripod were two popular imitators in Geocities' weird race to profitability through free web hosting, but it was in the Athens suburb of Geocities that Dr. CPU established the first Mistigris website, http://www.geocities.com/Athens/1758/mist.html, mirrored by the Internet Archive

Some distinctive characteristics of Geocities-era personal homepages included visitor counters, links to guestbooks, and [webring]s. Because this generation of webmasters predated the emergence of the web design profession, these homepages were often incredibly garish, featuring sparkling animated GIFs of dancing babies and hamsters in crass abundance, trumpeting bland general MIDI soundtracks through your speakers and sometimes hijacking the appearance of your mouse pointer. (The gold standard of web design would quickly pivot to trickier interactive animated interfaces made by hungry young Turks sharpening their Flash skills on Newgrounds and Kongregate, while the essentially naive web design aesthetic of Geocities would have its final glorious flowering in people skinning their MySpace page.)

Geocities is gone and will never come back, but its small-beans DIY attitude has been carried on, beginning in 2013, by Neocities.