If you had a site on geocities you can probably still get it from either the Archive team torrent or from http://reocities.com/ , simply append your old url. There is a 'self service' bit (see the FAQ) where you can archive your website and have a download link mailed to you.
It's been running for a few years now and gets approximately 35K unique visitors daily.
From a commercial point of view it is a complete failure but the emails from happy people that I keep getting about the project are more than enough payment.
If you can't find it on reocities, try http://oocities.com as well. No idea which generally has more or if they both have pretty solid collections. My lame 12-year-old music fan site is preserved on both!
Not sure if this is the best place to ask, but I get a "page not found (yet)" (when I attempt to get to my old site) which suggests that you're still in the process of restoring pages. Is this still the case? Or do I assume that my data is long gone at this point.
Edit: Even if my data is gone, I really appreciate what you've done; and I'm sure others do too. Wish Yahoo had shuttered it more gracefully.
No need to be sorry. Thanks for setting the service up and trying! I'm sure it's helped lots of people.
As for my site; I'm sure I have backup's (somewhere :) of the really valuable data. It's just more for taking a look at My First Website and reeling at the horror more than anything else.
Ugh. I think my old page had a "Free Kevin Mitnick" banner next to an animated gif that said "Made with Macintosh". Not that these clues narrow it down very much, if you want to find my page.
It's all static, no compression (just one large xfs file tree), it costs a few hundred euros per month. At the time the server (20T) was quite expensive, one of these days it will have to be re-done and fortunately storage costs have come down quite a bit so the per-month write off on the server will be (a lot) lower.
i was a part of the team that bought GeoCities at Yahoo, and i think it wasn't as dumb of a deal as it looks on paper, because a) YHOO stock was so high at the time that the $3.8B wasn't actually all that dilutive, and b) buying GeoCities ensured Yahoo was the #1 destination online, and thus we could command a disproportionate share of ad revenue. If you wanna look at a really silly deal that Yahoo did, how about the Broadcast.com deal? Billions for a bunch of servers...
My first actually-online website was on Angelfire. I’ll never see it again, because:
1. It was auto-deleted after a period of inactivity,
2. The Wayback Machine doesn’t know about it, and
3. My local copy was deleted by Microsoft thanks to a bug in Windows. (I was moving a folder across my home network from my old Windows 98SE computer to an XP box, and when the move operation encountered a folder with an accented character in its name, the entire operation failed — and deleted all of the data that was to be moved.)
Well, the oldest I had called “Kids’ Rave Book Reviews” — KRBR for short — and I had started off what I vaguely hoped to be a community project by posting my review of The Ear, The Eye, and the Arm, which I had just re-read in sixth grade.
This is very relevant now because rumors are that Yahoo is about to buy Tumblr for over a billion dollars. If they only took care of Geocities they would not have to buy it all over again in Tumblr form.
Geocities time came and went, and I don't actually blame Yahoo for that (though I do blame them for the way in which it was shut down, lots of people lost their content forever, we didn't get everything out in time).
As a portal it failed because the basic concepts of free accounts and uploading made it a haven for spammers, as a commercial concept it failed because bulk display advertising rates dropped through the floor during the .com bust and in spite of losing money Yahoo kept it running for many years.
To 'fix' geocities would have meant grandfathering in a few million accounts, re-inventing the service in a way that would make it profitable against the rise of the new homepage provider: facebook.
I personally don't think that is something that they could have done, not with Yahoo's image and the legacy they were still hauling along. It needed a clean break with the past and ditching Geocities gave Yahoo an opportunity to do just that (which they then subsequently mostly wasted).
Yahoo did the right thing, but they went about it in a terribly callous way. All they had to do was to deny google crawling access to geocities, freeze the uploads, allow account archival and deletion in an automated way (easy for them to do). That way we wouldn't have this gaping hole in the web today, and we wouldn't have desperate people trying to find their old stuff through whatever means possible.
I'm sure 1 fte and a few hundred bucks worth of bandwidth would have been a price worth paying for Yahoo given the dent it gave their image, it definitely was worth paying that much to me to try to keep it running.
Different era.
Different CEO.
Different corporate culture.
Different demography.
Different way people use the internet.
Vastly different size of users.
Tumblr could very well die on its own without anyone's help. Last I heard it was not making any profit yet, and took huge amount of money from investors. In the long term, investors don't care how many users you have if you are not making much money.
I personally want tech industry to get away from 2-3 companies dominating. I want a new challenger, that could be yahoo (we don't know yet), but I am willing to give them the benefit of doubt; and a chance to prove themselves under new leadership.
Last time a startup went in and was killed. Rumour has it that they halt the progress of things till it's no longer relevant to the real world and then kill it.
This wouldn't be perfect, but it would at least leverage Geocities a bit more than shutting it down:
Start Tumblr-style side venture. Pitch it to existing Geocities customers in various ways with advantages like shared logins and some semblance of import tool easing adoption. Let Tumblr roll on from that kick start. Eventually phase out or shut-down Geocities.
" In a separate announcement, GeoCities posted a net loss of $8.4 million, or 27 cents a share, for the fourth quarter ended, compared with losses of $3 million, or 14 cents a share in the year-ago period. Revenue for the three month period rose 341 percent to $7.5 million. For the year, the company lost $19.8 million, or 71 cents per share, compared to a net loss of $8.9 million, or 44 cents a share, in 1997. "
and bought for $3.57 billion... With 19 million unique visitors per month, or 228 million per year, you'd need to generate revenue of $15 from each of those _visitors_ on average to just return the investment... (not accounting for the losses)
The good ol' economic sense of the 90's... That said, hindsight is always so 20:20.
Ah Instagram, Facebook, twitter, tumblr... You really think that all the google ads you've seen in your life (let alone on a given site) add up to a return of $15? I'd be much more likely to give geocities $15 for a premium account than I would be to ever click on an ad.
This space can be lucrative, but every success is over the bodies of many failed companies. This phase we're in now is equally silly.
> I'd be much more likely to give geocities $15 for a premium account than I would be to ever click on an ad.
I really wish this was a more common attitude.
You could make it happen for less than $15. At a value of $1/CPM to a website owner displaying one ad. $5 would cover one user for ~5,000 page views. ~10,000 page views taking into account the 50% of users using adblock today, value equal to double.
Imagine you pay $5 for every 10,000 page views on previously adverted sites and the money was distributed among those websites you visited.
I don't understand why ad-driven companies don't offer an option for premium. I would lobby hard for Facebook if I could pay to preserve my privacy and not see ads.
Fun fact: the stock used to buy GeoCities would still be worth billions of dollars, even if the vesting/lock-in schedule was extraordinarily long.
Anyway, the interesting thing about a lot of the big late '90s dot-com acquisitions that now look like sheer insanity is that they were all a product of everyone latching onto what they thought the current "big thing" was. Back then it was portals, aggregation, hosting, and ISPs. But it turned out that technological advancements erased a lot of the reasons why those things could be profitable (at least the way they were). Instead the next big things were search, web-apps, and social features (Web 2.0). Livejournal, blogger, flickr, google, google maps, etc. What people figured out, eventually, is that even if you have a million users that doesn't mean that it's easy to make even a million dollars a year.
Now, of course, there are lots of people who think they know what the "big thing" is, and companies are again shelling out billions for acquisitions, few of which will seem sensible in 10 years, or even 5.
It already looks brilliant. Instagram now represents around 10% of FB users and Wall Street is assigning it a corresponding value of ~10% of the company i.e. over $6 Billion (just rough math to make a point).
I disagree FB is vastly overvalued. It's not undervalued but if they weren't producing real revenues and profits they would be worth ~what they have in the bank, like Zynga.
FB is vastly different from Zynga and its earnings are only a fraction of the total valuation, which is based on hopes and dreams more than anything else.
I think this was part of what Larry Page was trying to get across yesterday after Google released a bunch of services that (potentially) trounced many hotly contested competing services.
There's been a lot of billions thrown around over some relatively uninspired ideas and it seems like a concerted attempt to create a false, easily manipulated, bubbly marketplace.
I guess I don't understand what Page was trying to communicate? That there is still room in this world for people to make a living, as long as Google decides they aren't interested in that market? Do we really need, for example, another music streaming service from Google/Facebook/Amazon when we already have _several_ excellent, focused, and competitive streaming services out there?
IMNSHO DoJ needs to hit Google and the rest of these 800lb gorillas very hard with the anti-trust stick...
I think he was trying to say that current competition is incredibly trivial.
I think the Google streaming service utilizes Google's ability to personalize tastes pretty well. At least, so far, it's exceeded my Spotify and Rdio experiences.
I was pretty surprised when I loaded up the free trial of Google Music All Access and right off the bat it suggested some smart playlists that I really agree with. It took me weeks/months on other services to get that level of recommendations.
But that being said, I do have my music collection on Google Play Music and listen from there, so Google had a head start already.
Not to mention ABN Amro, which was effectively bailed out and nationalised during the global financial crisis. If only AltaVista had been considered too big to fail...
I say "effectively", because the many mergers and splits it went through in the 00s meant the large parts nationalise in the Netherland and the UK were not identical to what it was in '99 when this analyst was interviewed.
It should be noted that Geocities was a public company at the time with a market cap of $2.3b. But also that it generated only $7.5m in revenue the prior quarter.
I had a Geocities site around 1999 and I remember that adverts started appearing on the site around that time. At first (if I remember correctly) it was opt-in, but then at some point they just started appearing anyway. Problem was, this was a long time ago when DOM-manipulation was not so easy, and with Geocities there was no common page template - and hence nowhere obvious to put adverts that would work for every geocities site. I think the solution they came up with was little floating pop-up windows that appeared over the top of the edges of the page. It looked ugly, and was also pretty buggy.
No one would make a blog/homepage site like Geocities these days without ringfencing somewhere to put the ads. How things have changed.
My guess is that it was worth it at that time. GeoCities was huuuge. It's where I started and many of the sites I would encounter at the time from search results were hosted on GeoCities. Ah, those were the days.
It does not matter what something is worth today. Five years from now it could be gone. I doubt GeoCities was the first, and it certainly is not the last, to suffer that fate.
Oh, those heads days! That a "website" could be bought for $3bn+ prodded a lot of young employees to say "WTF, let me quite my job and make a website.com". I should know, because I was one of them.
I am trying to think of the others like GeoCities. all I can think of is Tripod, Angelfire, and members.aol.com pages. there were a bunch of others back in the day.
I think that http://cnnfn.cnn.com/1998/06/08/technology/yahoo/ was a much more reasonable purchase. Though just think of how much more that company could have made if they had waited until the market became frothier!
(Don't worry, the founders in that deal are doing quite well for themselves now...)
That was fantastic. What the heck happened to Yahoo. They were awesome. They had the best search page/directory, they had the best webmail. Then one day they decide that they're a media company and all of the usefulness died and Google picked up right where Yahoo left off, with what? A good search engine and the best webmail.
That Aol, Yahoo, and Geocities were the top sites on the internet back then makes me wonder if we're now screwed out of the future innovation that might happen because our big 2, Google and Facebook, may be too big to fail (or at least fall), at least for a while.
This was a link where I just went straight to the commentary to see who else is old school.
I view this as mostly an execution issue from Yahoo. People were buying companies, but there were very few examples of good integration. Instagram actually is such an example.
What this tells me is that current perceived bubble isn't nearly what the 1999 one was, which is a good sign. Yahoo better take care of Tumblr and put extensive resources behind it.
It's been running for a few years now and gets approximately 35K unique visitors daily.
From a commercial point of view it is a complete failure but the emails from happy people that I keep getting about the project are more than enough payment.