“[W]ebsites and hosting services should not be ‘fads’ any more than forests and cities should be fads – they represent countless hours of writing, of editing, of thinking, of creating. They represent their time, and they represent the thoughts and dreams of people now much older, or gone completely. There’s history here. Real, honest, true history.” And thus did the Archive Team set out to save the entirety of Geocities. → Read More
Today marks the death of an internet giant. One of the first, one of the best. Oh GeoCities. What would we have done without you? Where would we have put our brightly colored, constantly flashing backgrounds? Who else had rotating .gifs for links and neon green page hit counters? There is no substitute for your plethora of font colors and sizes, for your broken HTML codes and page badges, for your MIDI synth-horns. We will sorely miss your animated “Under Construction” signs we came to know and love. → Read More
Last week we heard that silver-age internet legend GeoCities would be closing down forever. Although that’s no great loss in itself, it’s a bit like finding out the really crappy pizza place you used to go to when you were a kid is being demolished. If you could just have one more greasy, poorly seasoned slice to remember what it was like… Well, in GeoCities’ case, you can. TechCrunch readers submitted what they felt were the most (or their most) shamefully designed GeoCities pages on the whole site. I’ve collected the links here so you don’t have to troll through the comments. → Read More
Not with a bang, but with a whimper. Yahoo! is unceremoniously closing GeoCities, one of the original web-hosting services acquired by Yahoo! in 1999 for $2.87 billion. (Fun venture fact: Fred Wilson’s Flatiron Partners was an investor). In a message on Yahoo!’s help site, the company said that it would be shuttering Geocities, a free web-hosting service, later this year and will not be accepting any new customers. Existing customers will still be able to access use GeoCities but Yahoo! is encouraging these customers to upgrade to Yahoo!’s paid Web Hosting service.
GeoCities’ traffic has been falling over the past year. According to ComScore, GeoCities unique visitors in the U.S. fell 24 percent in March to 11.5 million unique visitors from 15.1 million in March of 2008. Back in October, 2006, it had 18.9 million uniques. → Read More
What were the top social media sites of 2008? ComScore came out with its worldwide traffic stats for November a few days ago (so these don’t include December). They are a mix of social networks and blogging platforms. Blogger, the orange line in the chart above, still rules the roost with an estimated 222 million unique worldwide visitors in November (up 44 percent from November, 2007). Facebook, the blue line, is on pace to pass it soon with 200 million unique visitors (up 116 percent). (Note, though, that this is more than the 140 million active users Facebook itself reports—go figure). MySpace is pretty steady at 126 million uniques. Wordpress is a close fourth and gaining with 114 million (up 68 percent). And Windows Live Spaces is down 22 percent to 87 million uniques.
ComScore keeps a list of what it calls “social networking” sites, but these include blogging platforms and other social media sites as well. While the audience for blogs is still showing healthy growth overall, Facebook stands out as the social gorilla taking share from not only other social networks but blogs and other social media as well. Below are the top 20 sites on comScore’s social networking list. → Read More
