You know what? Me too. I miss Geocities and I never realized until just now.
That was a great internet. The people's internet. I was 13 years old but I was allowed to make a website for free, with no help or direction from parents or teachers or anyone, with barely anything to learn.
And when I was done it was there. It was a thing I made on the internet and I could show anyone. And I did, and it was probably embarrassingly bad, but that's not the point.
I think more than anything in my career, services like Geocities inspired me.
See the internet? You can make it. You can do this stuff. It's not that hard.
Nobody else in my life told me that. Nobody explained to me that creating things on a computer wasn't magic, and if I wasn't enticed with such an easy website creator I may have never known.
What do I give my kids? What do I give my little cousins, right now, at the age of 10, that even comes close?
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Looking around there seem to be a few, but they're all so template-centric that I wonder if I'd feel the same way if I had them back then.
I wish I could upvote this comment more than once.
I remember getting on Geocities in 1996 and finding a burgeoning community, full of randomness and fun, all learning as we went along about how build websites. I remember mine was in the “Bourbon Street” “neighbourhood”.
I had a lot of fun that year, messing about on IRC, learning HTML, building (ugly :-) websites, helping others do the same. Can't believe I sound nostalgic about that place.
I think I'll set up my daughter (nearly 9, already has her own domain) with a GitHub account, and set up Pages so she can play with HTML, CSS and stuff.
Same here. I remember in '97 my grandma bought me a Geocities "plus" (or whatever it was called) account so I could have a geocities.com/~username vanity address. All my real life nerd friends were so jealous of me. :-)
Having free home pages on Geocities did a lot for my career. What will my son gain from whatever "social" web site is around when he starts using a computer (and yeah he also already has his own domain name)?
Something has been lost in the evolution from home pages to Facebook and Twitter. The creation part of the equation has been reduced down to nothing more than choosing a picture to stick in a predefined slot.
I miss when people I know used LiveJournal. LJ encouraged people to write, long form. Then came MySpace and the birth of the status update, which was on even ground with the blog feature. Then Facebook banished blogging to the "Notes" area that nobody ever read, while elevating the status update to the central communication channel. Then, of course, Twitter boiled it down to nothing but status updates.
I miss when more average Internet users made home pages. I miss when more of them blogged, and participated in communities that revolved around the blog format rather than status updates.
