Today, October 26, 2009, is the last day of Geocities. While the site is still technically open, they have not been allowing new accounts for a while now.
It's kind of sad, since many people have made their very first website on Geocities (others may have chosen Tripod or Angelfire, but Geocities always seemed the most user friendly. As the last one standing, as well, this marks the end of an era of user-created web content (that was supported heavily by advertisements).
Websites such as those, which were more or less a tutorial on how to write HTML code (either that or end up with a background that offends the eyes) are pretty much gone - it seems as if people now either create more content (building their own site from scratch and paying to host, etc.) or more specialized content (webcomic hosts like Comic Genesis or blog hosts like Wordpress are abundant, while whole site creation seems to have gone the way of the dinosaur). I guess in part it speaks to a need of specialization on the internet, but I actually think it's more a point of a) bringing like-sites together (e.g. the Blogger network is probably far more connected than all the disparate Geocities sites) and b) more user friendly creation tools that streamline site creation far more than Geocities ever did. With pretty much every site being customizable nowadays, (hello, gmail and Photobucket) the need for Geocities has really dwindled.
Still, it's a sad day in the world of the internet - the last bastion of free webhosting seems to be coming down. At least we get to enjoy a bunch of Geocities jokes like the one over at xkcd.
As a side note, I'm starting to use Tooltips in my links now - if you hover over one, you get a short text comment. It's usually unnecessary, but it allows me to be snarky so I enjoy it~
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