Requiem for Geocities

RIP GeocitiesYou may have heard the news: Geocities finally closed its doors, shuttering all of its websites as of today.  I have been reminiscing about Geocities and what it meant to me, and thinking about what it meant to women on the internet.

Geocities was a launching off point for a lot of people, a way to get their feet wet with internet communication.  By providing a safe and easy way to create a website, without a lot of technical nonsense, it made it possible for a lot of "regular people" to create websites, formerly the purview of the technical elite.  

Many of those people (myself included) went on to graduate from Geocities and learn how to create real websites, and contribute to the internet in a more meaningful fashion than a collection of animated gifs and background images.  So many of us have shameful Geocities sites in our past, but we wouldn't be where we are today without them, and for that, the service should be thanked.

Is it just me, or were Geocities users predominately female?  It's probably just me, because it also seems to me that most bloggers are female, even though most men assume that most bloggers are male.  But wait, statistics are on my side!  A recent survey showed that 56 percent of bloggers are female, and that women are far more likely to continue working on their blogs (instead of abandoning them) compared to men.

Geocities showed that you can make a living by making it easy for people to build online, and this is a lesson that was learned - and learned well - by services like LiveJournal, Blogger, Wordpress, and Typepad.  Untold numbers of women will start with a free Typepad account, and end up teaching themselves the skills to be system administrators or web programmers.  

The sad part of Geocities' story, really, is that it failed to change with the times.  In the face of the roaring success of social networking sites like Facebook (63% of users are female) and MySpace (63% of users are female), and of blogging sites like LiveJournal (65% of users are female) Geocities kept on with its old schtick.  Even after it was clear that women were more interested in using a tool to communicate on a daily updated basis, and less interested in a static "traditional" website which had to be painstakingly updated by hand.

It's easy to imagine a world in which Geocities had kept up with the times, and given its audience what they wanted.  People loved Geocities for what it was - easy, fun, and free - and if they had added a more robust social networking and blogging platform, they could easily have crushed the competition.

Fortunately there are still plenty of on ramps that women can take onto the Information Superhighway.  (Remember that metaphor?  Like I said, I have been feeling nostalgic.)  Many of them restrict you to using a template set, and make it more difficult to add animated "Under Construction" and "E-Mail Me" gifs.  But take it from me, that's a feature, not a bug.