GeoCities was an important outlet for personal expression on the Web for almost 15 years, but was discontinued on October 26, 2009.
On July 2009
Yahoo! Inc. announced that the popular free hosting service Yahoo!
GeoCities was closing down. On October 26th all the existing web pages
were finally deleted from Yahoo's servers. Since then, we have been
working hard to recover hundreds of thousands of sites and we keep on
working on the task of recovering as much of the History of the Internet
as we possibly can. Now you
can start editing your site. If you found your site in our online archive you
can start editing it by just following the instructions in the
Sign Up Page and registering a
user.
Send us
your questions, comments and archive requests. Check our
forums !
About The Web Archive Project
GeoCities is dead ... everybody knows that.
You know the
story ... we all do : On late 2009 Yahoo! Inc. announced that the
popular free hosting service Yahoo! GeoCities was closing down. After
October 26th 2009, all our GeoCities files were going be deleted as the
company decided not to provide free hosting services any more.
We don't know if
the same happened to you but, when we heard the news that Yahoo! was
closing GeoCities down we were overwhelmed by a sense of sadness and
loss; it was like, by doing this, they were taking away a big part of
the History of the Internet with them, our history, your history.
Like many
others, we felt like it was not enough for us to back our sites up and
run them somewhere else. Our sites were not just our sites, they were
part and they made us part of an idea, they made us part of a community.
We had to preserve as much of our community as we possible could, we had
to preserve GeoCities !
There are many
internet archives out there. They are like photo albums which show you
the image of what it once was, but nothing more. Preserving a community
involves much more than just providing the public with a set of
snapshots of dead web pages, it means allowing the community to express,
to interact, to change, to evolve ... this is far beyond what a simple
snapshot can do.
So, days passed
by and we kept on wondering whether it was possible or not and how hard
and expensive could it be. But if we were going to do something, we had
to act fast, or it would be too late for us to do anything at all. So
finally, one glorious night a decision was made and an action plan was
written ... on a bar napkin : we were going to take the challenge, we
were going to be part of the history of the Internet, we were going to
save GeoCities !
This site was
born as a result of our desire to preserve as much of our original
community as we possibly could and to expand it beyond it's original
limits and barriers. To promote the community and it's grow, we will be
progressively providing you with as many tools, means, knowledge and
support as we possible can but we really cannot do this alone; you are
part of this large community now and as a member of such, you are
responsible for it, for it's health and growth. Develop your site,
expand your limits, talk to others, get involved, ask for help, a whole
community is there for you, know that we count on you.
So now that you
know how it began, it is time for you to tell us how it's going to
continue, so tell us please ...
