-
1 of 10
-
2 of 10
-
3 of 10
-
4 of 10
-
5 of 10
-
6 of 10
-
7 of 10
-
8 of 10
-
9 of 10
-
10 of 10
Deadbeat Report – 11/2/09
Chris Bodovinitz
Comments
Story
One week has passed since the Internet giant Yahoo closed Geocities. It just doesn’t feel the same anymore.
My childhood seems to have died, never mind the fact I was only 12-years-old when I hosted my first Web site on Geocities. However, I wasn’t the only one who created a site on Geocities. In fact, at its peak in the late 90s, Geocities was one of the most-visited Web sites on the Internet.
The promise of free Web site hosting was just too great to pass up, and millions of kids like myself flocked to it hoping to broadcast our thoughts with glittery backgrounds, flashing links and colorful text so bright it was almost illegible. We didn’t care if anyone paid attention to our Web site. We were the Webmasters! We controlled what was seen!
It was my generation’s watered-down version MySpace. And now it’s gone. But that’s not entirely a bad thing. As superficial and nostalgic as this may seem, the closing of Geocities didn’t just kill a bunch of amateur web sites. It has officially marked the end of Web 1.0.
Web 1.0 can best be described as the true beginnings of the Internet’s appeal to the general population. Web sites in this era communicated primarily in one-way. It was quite simple: An owner (called a “Webmaster”) would make a web site and people would look at it. The Web site would be updated as often as the Webmaster provided. Users didn’t have many options to provide feedback other than directly e-mailing or leaving messages on a message forum if one existed.
This static state of Web 1.0 didn’t exist just because people weren’t creative enough to produce the dynamic web sites that we’re used to seeing today. It was because of our technological capabilities at the time. Most people were connected to the Internet at much slower speeds. The ability to create dynamic Web sites where users could generate his or her own content started popping up when broadband speeds were introduced. Web 1.0’s days were numbered as Web 2.0 took over with better technology came better communication.
We now live in Web 2.0, where the Internet is mostly comprised of user-generated content. The Webmaster is no longer needed since users themselves could upload his or her own information whenever he or she wished. Without Web 2.0 it would be impossible to upload images to Flickr, impossible to add information to your Facebook profile, harder to host your own blog without coding skills and ridiculous to tell me when you were eating meatloaf through Twitter.
The popularity of web sites hosted through Geocities decreased as people became more infatuated with blogs, social networking and fast media hosting. The Internet today is much more useful and well rounded now that users aren’t reliant to the one-way communication and limitations of Web 1.0. It is a great example to show the true power behind technological advances. Web 3.0 is only a dream right now, but once we build upon what we have, it will become the next reality. Uh–I mean E-reality.
Listen to the Deadbeat Report podcast every other Monday at deadbeatreport.wordpress.com.