According to Mark Milian of the LA Times, Geocities was perhaps the first mainstream example of an open, participatory and personal Internet, its been there longer than I have been connected and, for years, any search of the web produced at least a couple of Geocities sites. It still attracts 10 million site visits a month but now, as Chris Crum writes, it is over. R.I.P. GeoCities: A Community is Killed

Yahoo has officially shut down Geocities.The company has said that it did not count the property among its priorities, so it is simply getting rid of it. Yahoo has shut down about 20 services in less than a year.

[...] Ok, so there are other options for GeoCities users, but is just shutting down a community that still attracts so much traffic the right thing to do? Yahoo's way of going about it has been widely questioned. According to Compete data, GeoCities has still been seeing over 10 million unique monthly visitors as recently as last month. Why would Yahoo want to just shut that down?

[...] It seems unwise from a business perspective, but what about the users? Does Yahoo have an obligation to its users who may have spent years using their GeoCities site only to have it pulled from the web? Should Yahoo provide a forwarding web address for GeoCities users?

MySpace isn't exactly at the peak of its popularity, but there are still tons of people who use it.

What if they just pulled everything? What if Google bought Facebook and decided to kill it? What if your Tweets vanished?

Sure these things seem unlikely now because these services are still fresh. Well, GeoCities was once the "it" thing too. Granted, most GeoCities sites I have seen are not much to look at now, but that doesn't mean people aren't getting use out of them. They're obviously getting page views.

OK, I accept that Yahoo! might have a commercial or operational reason for doing this, but shifting a site that may have been up for years, with all its files, is a huge job and not to offer some kind of simple migration to a blog for example is just bad PR.

Then there's the issue of millions of links to Geocities pages that will now vanish, again, an automated tool could set up forwarding to the new address for every page, but once Geocities closes, all that we'll have left is dead links.

This isn't the first such event, nor will it be the last, but as the internet ages, it will happen more often, hollowing out the whole system from the inside even as it grows at the edges. Yes, search engines will soon enough find those files that are transferred, but those that are not will mostly disappear, to be found only in google's cache if you really want it or in the wayback machine.

As the net becomes increasingly the memory of our collective mind, will it also be subject to an equally collective amnesia - or worse, Alzheimers?

Meanwhile, I'll continue to promote the many free tools available, from Facebook and Twitter to Ning, PBWorks, Flickr, YouTube, MyCommittee and so on.

Just remember that your rights under a free site are very limited and it can disappear tomorrow, don't keep irreplaceable material only where its free and preferably use tools that enable you to download the entire content to your hard drive in a single operation.

That may mean getting familiar with the old guys like FTP or finding tools with downloads using XML, but the moral will always be - backup!

What's your experience? Did you have a Geocities site? What free online services do you use and how do you rate them? In a pinch, how could you recover all the material you have posted there? Comments are open.

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With all the talk about cloud compouting and SaaS (software as a service) its good to see some people have our interests at heart. One of the key questions about hosting your data on someone else's servers focuses on what happens if you can't get to that data, either because your connection is down or their connection is down or,. worst case, they have gone bankrupt.

So when you sign up for the service, maybe item one should be what happens to the data when they fail. This might be the manifesto:the Data Liberation Front [Read more →]

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The first email tool I ever used was Eudora and, despite trying several others along the way, it still is. Sadly for me, it is no longer being produced and my final version was last updated 3 years ago and now taken over by Thunderbird. Many of us use Outlook and hopefully have local folders for storing and accessing emails while we are offline or if the exchange server is not available.

The wisdom of a client that can manage your email on your own machine becomes clearer when we see this happening. Another Gmail Outage Blocks E-Mail for Millions of Users [Read more →]

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When you look at a web page, most of what you see isn't actually in the page with all the graphics and buttons and flashing lights, it sits in a database and when you ask for that page by clicking on a link, the web server loads the content into the structure of a page and presents it to you. There are many advantages to doing things this way, one of which is that the information in the database doesn't have to be viewed in a web page.

Which is where RSS feeds come in, they are a kind of side door to the content in the database. They enable you to view the content without all the fancy bells and whistles of a web page but still provide a link back to the original URL of the page so that you can link to it from your own site if you like.

RSS feeds are now an essential transport system for moving information around the Internet and its great for making information available to different people in different places. [Read more →]

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Millions of people were cut off from Google's search engine, email and other online services last week sparking a flurry of frustrated venting that served as a reminder of society's growing dependence on Google's technology. via Google service stumbles - Technology - NZ Herald News.

The California-based company blamed the trouble on a glitch that routed too much of its traffic through computers in Asia, overwhelming its system so badly that about 14 per cent of its users encountered problems with the internet's most popular search engine. The mistake also affected Google's email and several other services.

The outages lasted for about an hour, according to Urs Hoelzle, Google's senior vice-president of operations.

Google's problems rippled around the web because other sites rely on its analytics service and draw much of their traffic from searches through Google. Many websites took twice as long to load and were twice as likely to fail during Google's disruption, according to Gomez, which helps internet companies manage their applications.

Before the repair, many people locked out from Google went elsewhere on the internet to express their dismay and despair.

There are two great principles at work on the internet. One is the end-to-end principle. When Doc Searls & David Weinberger launched worldofends.com they used a telling phrase. “Take the value out of the centre and you enable an insane flowering of value among the connected end points.”

Google, despite our perceptions, is an edge technology, not a central one, but because of the other principle at work, we have made it central. That principle is the power law that says in any free market (and the internet is as close to free as we can get so far) a few people will gain insane levels of power while in the long tail, most of us will still manage.

The problem is, because of the power law and because of its massive utility, we have merged Google and web 2.0 thinking into the heart of our processes, and when it fails, as it will occasionally, we fail with it.

I had a discussion about a year ago on whether keeping health records in an encrypted text message on your cellphone, or hosting them on Google is the preferred option. Last week just reinforces my contention that mission critical stuff needs to be, at the least, backed-up locally at all times.

Where does that leave software as a service (SaaS)? What do you think? comments are open.

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