For those of you who were not on the Internet in the 1990s, GeoCities was a web hosting network that was one of the few ways at that time that a person could easily set up for free their own website. GeoCities used the principle of neighborhoods and, well, cities, to organize these websites. Communities of websites focused on and were named for general topics of interest. Computer-related sites were in SiliconValley. There was Heartland for farm people, Area51 for science-fiction fans, Petsburgh for pet owners and the Enchanted Forest for young children -- overall, GeoCities had several dozen cities, each one of which had its own specialized neighborhoods.
Beginning in 1994, GeoCities, then known as Beverly Hill Internet, started giving out free digital homesteads for people to create their own personal websites. GeoCities became a public company in 1998 with its initial share price rising from $17 to $100 by 1999, at which time Yahoo! bought the entire business for three-and-a-half billion dollars. GeoCities was then the third most popular Internet destination, outranked only by Yahoo! and America Online. Yahoo! kept GeoCities running until October 26, 2009. Before the plug was pulled on this conglomeration of communities, a group called the Archive Team made a massive snapshot backup of the ten years worth of website collaboration done by over thirty-five million people, the result being a 900 Gbyte BitTorrent file.
This month, Richard Vijten, an independent information designer, has released a visualization of this massive file as an interactive exploration called "The Deleted City." You can scroll across the entire map of cities, zoom in on neighborhoods and zoom on down to individual homepages. A 2:40 video at the site The Deleted City gives you a brief glimpse of this historical artifact -- more detail is available at Richard Vijgen, the homepage of this Dutch teacher and artist.
The history of the Internet is no longer limited to those orphaned websites that you've kept in your Favorites list for the sake of nostalgia. "The Deleted City" is proof that nothing ever vanishes on the Internet.
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