My First Brush of Internet ‘Stardom’ – Geocities

The closure of Yahoo Inc.’s GeoCities marks the end of an era. Launching in mid-1995, GeoCities was known as the base for the first ‘personal’ website. Users were able to create their own websites to display anything he or she wanted, ranging from pictures to videos to rants and raves. The topic of said created website could be about anything. One could either devote a little part of the World Wide Web to him or herself, or create virtual shrines for his/her guinea pigs, golf ball collection or the Spice Girls. Other similar sites launched at around the same time (Angelfire, Expage, Tripod), but none could fully offer the ease and convenience that GeoCities offered.

Even after the glory days of GeoCities were long gone, the site’s traffic was insanely high. In 2008 alone the site received about 177 million unique visitors. That statistic landed them on the list of the Top 200 most visited websites that year. Still, this could not prevent the imminent; GeoCities has become past its prime. Other websites of its kind have either already closed or been virtually forgotten about. GeoCities was truly the best of its kind.

Personally, I thought GeoCities went down a long time ago. After the beginning of high school, when social networking sites (Friendster, MySpace and Facebook) and blogging sites (LiveJournal, Xanga, Tumblr) started to spread to the youth culture, sites such as GeoCities and Expage seem to become endangered and left in the back of peoples’ minds. However, I remember GeoCities as being my first real portal to having an identity on the Internet.

I created my first webpage when I was about ten years old. It wasn’t anything fancy, since I didn’t know HTML at the time. I was proud of my creation though. With a partly cloudy backdrop and loud forest green Georgia font, I wrote a lot about my life as a 5th grader and posted up a lot of pictures of Lance Bass (I wanted to marry him at that time, but that childhood dream will never come true).  It wasn’t all that impressive, but it gave me an outpost for my creativity. I later gave up my website in lieu of LiveJournal, but I encountered GeoCities once more in my life when an ex-boyfriend created a website about how much he loved me in the ninth grade. Once flattering, the fact that many little-known facts of me and personal photos were up on a site without my permission is a bit creepy. He didn’t last very long.

The majority of people who grew up with the Internet has, at one point, toyed with GeoCities or one of its counterparts. The fact that our first encounter with the online world is now on the verge of extinction is bittersweet. What used to play a mega part in our subculture is now on the back of the backburner, and will probably never be visited again by most of us. However, we will never forget our first time highlighting our personalities, thoughts, opinions and selves to a wide fanbase of friends, families and strangers.

RELATED LINKS: Share your memories of GeoCities

~ by jessicaobscura on October 25, 2009.