Fred Wilson on investing in Geocities

avc.com

54 points·danw··7 comments

Dreamhost's blog post is a good read as well about Geocities history and crazy valuation http://blog.dreamhost.com/2009/04/24/theyre-internet-history...

That's a neat way to recruit new customers. I like the way you have to prove you're a Geocities user. Edit your Geocities page to say: "I’m off to DreamHost!" Pretty clever.

I hope that they freeze the websites as internet history after shuttering the service. I'm going to miss websites like:

http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Vista/6552/ or maybe http://www.geocities.com/saufor/

These are gems that should not be taken from us.

> I learned that the Internet is all about people expressing themselves on pages they own and control.

I didn't have a Geocities site but my dad had several. He created and maintained them for some of the organizations he was actively involved in. Photos, articles, a virtual storybook. He was very proud of it - he did it all by himself (which was a relief for his direct technical support line - me)

Perhaps we can say Geocities began the democratization of Internet self expression that has led to Facebook, Twitter and maybe even Googlezon and EPIC (or something similar). So long, Geocities, and thanks for the fish.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Googlezon

Are Facebook and Twitter destined for the same fate?

MySpace is.

Eventually, yes, I'd say so. GeoCities had a good 10+ year run. USENET lasted 20 years or so until it was overrun. Perhaps Facebook and Twitter can beat these, but they will certainly be killed off at some point, considering the rapid changes happening these days.

The key is that it's not a sudden shutdown -- it's the result of a painful decline over the span of a few years. The same thing will probably happen with FB and Twitter, as they lose users to the new thing.

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