Re: [NTLK] Geocities is closing down

From: L.W. Brown <lwb_at_mac.com>
Date: Thu Apr 30 2009 - 09:47:38 EDT

Clearly, they were losing money on it.
Someone was archiving the sites, but has not decided yet how to serve
the archive.
See 2 articles below:
+--------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Yahoo Pulls the Plug On GeoCities |
| from the myspace's-aesthetic-progenitor dept. |
| posted by timothy on Thursday April 23, @19:40 (The Internet) |
| http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid /04/23/2339224 |
+--------------------------------------------------------------------+

[0]Mike writes "It's official: Yahoo is [1]pulling the plug, and
GeoCities is dead. GeoCities had suffered a long and drawn-out battle
with its health over the past decade. An antiquated service model and
outdated technology are widely blamed for the struggle. An official
cause
of death, however, has yet to be determined. Awful, eye-punishing
graphics, lack of relevancy, and 'lowest-common-denominator design' are
believed to have contributed to it's demise. GeoCities was 15 years
old."
There is doubtless a lot of funny and informative stuff on there that's
worth saving (not just [2]Jesux, which pudge [3]has now migrated). If
some of it belongs to you, perhaps you should move it sometime in the
next few months.

Discuss this story at:
    http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid /04/23/2339224

Links:
    0. http://psoug.org/
    1. http://www.pcworld.com/article/163765/so_long_geocities_we_forgot_you_still_existed.html
    2. http://www.geocities.com/ResearchTriangle/Node/4081/
    3. http://pudge.net/jesux/

+--------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Archive Team Is Busy Saving Geocities |
| from the one-might-well-ask-why dept. |
| posted by kdawson on Monday April 27, @19:50 (The Internet) |
| http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid /04/27/2252227 |
+--------------------------------------------------------------------+

jamie found this note from Jason Scott, who organizes the Archive Team.
They are busy [0]downloading as much of Geocities as they can before it
vanishes from the Net after [1]Yahoo pulled the plug. (Note: that
textfiles.com link is a good candidate for [2]Readability.) "..after 48
hours of work, Archive Team has saved over 200,000 Geocities sites.
We're
now pulling in new sites at the rate of something like 5 a second. Is
that fast enough? We'll see, won't we. ... A side-effect of the whole
process is I now know way, way, way too much [sic] about Geocities
than I
ever expected to. We've had to dissect every aspect of how the site
functions to understand how to mirror things, from its history through
how it does crazy javascript ads. Some of it is stupid and some is
hilarious... We think we have most every site from 1999 and before on
Geocities that was left. ... It is more important to me to grab the data
than to figure out how to serve it later. People who have been talking
about copyright and stuff seem to think I'm going to sell it or take
credit or some crap. I don't see how the final collection won't end up
online, but how is elusive — maybe a torrent of a bunch of zip files, or
as a curated collection, or as a bunch of hard drives. However it is,
I'll make sure people can get it, somehow."

Discuss this story at:
    http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid /04/27/2252227

Links:
    0. http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/1961
    1. http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid /04/23/2339224&tid•
    2. http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/

On 30. Apr., 2009, at 08:38 AM, Sonny Hung wrote:

> http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/91221-GeoCities-Closing-Down
> A specific closing date has not yet been announced but GeoCities is no
> longer accepting new customers, although existing accounts will remain
> unchanged for now. GeoCities parent Yahoo! said more details
> regarding the
> shutdown will be coming this summer but in the meantime, the company
> will
> help customers "explore and build new relationships online in other
> ways."

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Received on Thu Apr 30 09:48:03 2009

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