GeoCities died yesterday. This has led to mass mockery of old-school GeoCities pages. Others have some sympathy:
Put yourself back in 1996. Imagine you’ve just pitched your tent online, and you’ve been given a blank page and 15 megabytes to tell the world about yourself. Think about how intoxicating it must have been to be able to do that for the first time. Wouldn’t you, too, have gone a little heavy on the blinky text?
I was there in 1996. Heck, I still have the diskettes for a beta of Mosaic here at my desk – an install that requires multiple 3.5″ floppies. And it’s true: For the early adopters, GeoCities was a place you could set up and get your feet wet. You could put your site into awesome webrings – the concept that later launched a million reciprocal link exchanges, and even could be given a nod as a seed for the whole Google linking algorithm.
I think a greater point to mock for that era were the number of companies who started setting up web sites, and putting them entirely in the hands of their ‘geeks.’ Now, I love geeks. I am a geek – but I’m also a geek trained in branding, marketing and communications. Back in 1996, a lot of the geeks in charge of web sites were none of the above. But ‘web pages’ were computer things, so they handed them to computer people. Many of them made abundant use of such treasures as the blink tag, because any new piece of knowledge had to be incorporated somehow. This early round later led to various battles for control of web sites once marketing departments realized that maybe they didn’t have a huge audience yet – but the audience they had was getting a warped view of their brand.
So raise a toast to GeoCities, the first taste of the Interwebs most old-schoolers ever had, without which.