Then in around 2002/2003, everyone else seemed to get online. After the hype of the dot com boom, the web was no longer a place just for early adapters. Blogs, (basically automated web sites) popped up. The content began to be shaped by the limitations of the web site’s automated script. “It puts a date by everything I enter… oh it must be an online diary, I’d better write what I’ve been doing today”
And it’s these recent adopters who now have the obsession with Twitter and FaceBook. They haven’t yet seen it all before, they don’t know what IRC, Usenet or BBS are. For all its bad points (textured backgrounds, tags and embedded MIDIs), at least Geocities educated their users about the web along the way. While the likes of MySpace and WordPress have made putting content online more accessible, they’ve also “dumbed-down” the process, which was inevitable I guess.

So while I won’t miss Geocities, I will miss some of the web sites it hosts. There are numerous long-abandoned fan sites for The X-Files I’ll read once in a while to see someone’s opinion on an episode after watching an episode on DVD. It would be a shame for them to just disappear.
I built my first web site with Geocities! I now work as a web programmer. How many FaceBook profiles do you think will sow the seeds of a career?