Remember GeoCities, Angelfire and Tripod? Bet you once created a site on one of those too – like most of us did at some point – for a school club, a favourite TV show fan page (complete with totally illegitimately used copyrighted images) or to show the world the (hopeless and awful) teen poetry we wrote with such passion.

Ok, maybe I was just a sad geek…

Regardless, the reason I’m bringing this up is because GeoCities, like many things dating from the 90’s is about to meet its maker. Yahoo (No, I will not use the exclamation mark) has announced a few days ago that it will be closing down the GeoCities free hosting service this summer; it promptly stopped new signups and has since been directing GeoCities users to its paid hosting service.

As naturally as Spring follows Winter (when climate change isn’t messing with us, that is!), it must be expected that services, especially ones conceived in 1994 when the web was but a baby, will one day close their doors. However, there are a number of reasons to be alarmed by this change:

• If Yahoo is willing to consciously destroy its users’ data, how should we feel about its other services like Flickr, Delicious and Upcoming, into which we pour vast amounts of personal data and time organising it?
• As Jeremy Keith quite rightly points out, “as someone who cares about online history, I’ll be watching to see how Yahoo deals with this situation and I hope they deal with it well (archiving data, redirecting links)” The sheer volume of link rot that is created around the web when large services die off without giving users a way to redirect to the content’s new home could be ugly. Search engines strive to give useful and current content, but if webhosts work against us, it makes our job exceedingly difficult!
• Where else will we find the most atrocious use of animated GIFs? Opera.com’s temporary “Celebrating 15 Years of Browser Innovation” comical homepage gets an honourable mention, and many of the mobile social networks we’ve used also keep the flame alive.

Our online identities are like pieces of a puzzle scattered around the web, so should we be concerned that, just like the dog that runs away with the corner piece of our best jigsaw, services being taken offline are running off with part of who we are?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 28th, 2009 at 12:35 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.