theshiftingstacks

According to the email I received from Yahoo!, Geocities is closing its doors.  Truth be told, I would not have noticed had I not received a direct email.  Yahoo! posted a Q&A section that covers the company's reasons for shuting down the service.  I only mention this here because I made my first forays into creating websites through Geocities.  You can take a look at my site (please do not laugh too hard) up until Oct. 26th.  I last accessed my Geocities site in 2005, but had built the website a couple years before.  Needless to say, I will not be upgrading to the Yahoo! web hosting service nor will I worry too much about what happens to my content.  The site I created through Geocities was simply a way for me to share my photography with friends and learn a great deal about html coding. 

Geocities deserves mention as many people first started building webpages through the service.  Aside for a handful of nostalgic users (like myself), most internet users will not see the lights go out at Geocities.  The world has moved on to bigger communities and better ways to share information on the World Wide Web.  The closing of Geocities is also evidence of the impermanence of WWW services.  Tools such as Facebook, Myspace, Twitter and the like will inevitably shut down or be superceded by another, better service.  And the decision to close the doors on a WWW service is ultimately based on the bottom line.  Libraries and other professions should keep the nature of the WWW when pouring content poured into online services.