GeoCities is going away.

In 1995, when I was working at Microsoft on the original MSN -- which was going to coincide with the launch of Windows 95 -- this company called "GeoCities" offered a free website hosting service. Somebody at work found out about it, and within a week, all of us had GeoCities sites.

I don't remember what mine looked like. I'd started looking into HTML back at Boeing in 1993 - 1994 (right before we all got laid off), so it wasn't hard to put up a little web page.

I don't think there were any pictures on mine, not at first, but I do seem to recall there were button icons.

Back then, they let you pick out a neighborhood, and the neighborhood indicated what kinds of things you liked to talk about or post about or read about. I was in a political neighborhood for awhile, but got tired of the endless (and pointless) discussions within a year or so, and moved on to somewhere else. Can't recall where anymore. Seems the old neighborhoods kind of disappeared after a few years.

Then Yahoo! bought out GeoCities a few years back, but they let us old GeoCities folks keep our sites -- but by this time, there were some serious limits to the storage allowed. Which is kinda weird, given that other sites (especially blogsites) were practically giving away space.

With the recent economic downturn, of course, most of the websites are struggling to stay afloat, and they've all started cutting back on the freebies. Flickr was the first one that affected me, with limitations on access (they kept the pictures, but restricted access to a specific number, unless you were willing to pony up some monthly fees). Now I don't visit there anymore.

Soon, this GeoCities site is going to disappear as well.

I've still got the Blogspot and the Facebook, but if those go away, I'm not going to worry about it. I doubt anyone but family will miss it.

It's been a fun ride, GeoCities. Nearly fifteen years. We had some good times.