Research Paper
May 25, 2017

Road Work

  GeoCities was a unique web hosting service and virtual community that met its peak in the late 1990s and was closed in 2009. GeoCities pioneered the concept of free web hosting services and set the stage for all web hosting companies to come. Users, dubbed as Homesteaders do to the wild west nature of the web at that point, could sign up for a homepage and e-mail address for free at a time where those services were specific to your ISP. While recently, and throughout it's later life it's been ridiculed by some for its blinking text, frames and popular use of fonts like Comic Sans MS and Times New Roman, it is fondly remembered by others for bringing people together.
  
	GeoCities was founded in November 1994 (1) under the name Beverly Hills Internet and took on a name change shortly after. When signing up for a GeoCities account, users are prompted to choose an address that relates to their interests. For example, I could build my homepage in the SiliconValley neighborhood, which is about computers and technology, in the Office suburb, and have 2918 as my street number. This address would correspond to the URL geocities.com/SiliconValley/Office/2918. Every neighborhood had a community center, community leaders, message boards and chat rooms. These factors established a sense of community and relatability between homesteaders. Users could subtract their number to view the homepages of their neighbors. There were also web rings, which were collections of sites for a certain topic.
	
	GeoCities had several tools for basic and advanced Homesteaders to use, like add-ons, affiliate programs and of course, other sites with useful information about how to get the most out of their websites. Stuff like this made GeoCities unique from other providers. Alongside of the basic HTML code editor, users could use GeoBuilder (later PageBuilder) to create pages without any programming experience with templates.
	
	As mentioned earlier, GeoCities had affiliate programs people can join to make money off of their sites, known as Pages that Pay. Homesteaders could sign up for the service, separate from signing up for GeoCities itself, and choose which products to feature on their site. Whenever a visitor clicks and purchases a product through that site, the creator of the page gets paid a portion of the price of the product. Companies like Staples and Barnes and Noble participated in this program. (7)
	
	GeoCities themselves advertised on member pages as well. These included traditional banner ads placed automatically onto the site, an optional GeoGuide which would link visitors to GeoCities' community features, and a GeoCities watermark that was displayed at the bottom right of the page.
	In May 1999, Yahoo officially acquired GeoCities for a staggering $4.56 billion (3) in stock in order to expand their community efforts. Later that year, the GeoCities terms of use were updated, giving Yahoo exclusive rights to use any content on user sites. Many users who had noticed the fine print backlashed, some quitting GeoCities permanently. (4) This was done with good intentions, as Yahoo wanted to mirror GeoCities content on multiple servers in different locations to speed up connections.
	
	GeoCities continued to run into the late 2000s, although by that time the neighborhood community system was discontinued in favor of vanity URLs (geocities.com/~yourname) and categories. GeoCities began to show its age. Tons of old, inactive websites from years past were still being hosted (despite multiple efforts to remove inactive accounts), the Java web building tools were outdated, and it didn't help that superior web hosting solutions were getting cheaper all the time, with more intuitive and modern creation tools like Weebly and Webs. This was during a time where social networks like MySpace and Facebook were rising in popularity, and expectations in how websites were designed and functioned were changing.
	
	In April of 2009, it was quietly announced that GeoCities would close that October. (5) Yahoo promised that the sites of customers of GeoCities' paid plans would stay up, in a read-only format, however by late 2014 those pages were gone as well. (6) If someone were to go to geocities.com now, they would be redirected to an ad for Aabaco Small Business, Yahoo's later web hosting offering, intended for businesses and professionals.
	
	As soon as GeoCities' closure was announced sites and organizations like Archive.org's Wayback Machine, Reocities.com, and Geocities.ws downloaded as much of GeoCities as possible. As a result, a significant amount content from its ruins is available through said websites. Alongside these online archives, there is a 1TB download available of data that was saved. The blog of the "GeoCities Research Institute" documents their experiences surfing through this massive archive. Through these websites and archives, we can learn about what it was like to have a homepage on GeoCities throughout nearly every stage of its life, as there are pages in these archives that were last updated way in 1996.
	
	GeoCities represents a simpler time, when the World Wide Web was something that we were making, rather than relying on 2 or 3 websites for our media and communication cravings. Who we would consider programmers now were ordinary people sharing their knowledge and talents with the world, and creating a web page just so happened to be the best way to do it.
	
Works Cited
    1. "GeoCities." Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 29 Apr. 2017, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeoCities. Accessed 25 May 2017.
    2. Sawyer, Ben, and Dave Greely. Creating GeoCities websites. Cincinnati, OH, Muska & Lipman Pub., 1999.
    3. Staff, CBSNews.com staff CBSNews.com. "Yahoo! To Buy GeoCities." CBS News, CBS Interactive, 28 Jan. 1999, www.cbsnews.com/news/yahoo-to-buy-geocities/. Accessed 25 May 2017.
    4. "Yahoo's Net growing pains." CNNMoney, Cable News Network, 2 July 1999, money.cnn.com/1999/07/02/technology/yahoo/. Accessed 25 May 2017.
    5. Rao, Leena. "Yahoo Quietly Pulls The Plug On Geocities." TechCrunch, TechCrunch, 23 Apr. 2009, techcrunch.com/2009/04/23/yahoo-quietly-pulls-the-plug-on-geocities/. Accessed 25 May 2017.
    6. "Yahoo Doing What They Do Best." One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age, 26 Aug. 2014, blog.geocities.institute/archives/5036. Accessed 25 May 2017.
    7. "GeoCities - Pages That Pay - Sales Center." GeoCities - Pages That Pay - Sales Center, web.archive.org/web/19990819010448/http://geocities.yahoo.com:80/pagesthatpay/. Accessed 25 May 2017.