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So was GeoCities the FaceBook of 1999?
by GiraffeNecktie 17y ago
So was GeoCities the FaceBook of 1999?
- TheBranca18 17y agoNo. Not even close.
- tibbon 17y agoNo? While scale wise it obviously wasn't, in the mid to late 90's it was the place that most people had their first websites and communities grow. People act like 'the wall' on FB is something new. Hello? Guestbooks.
- TheBranca18 17y agoI guess I didn't think of it that way. I was thinking more of the barrier for a regular user to get started. From what I remember, the wizard for a casual user wasn't that great, so knowing HTML was a necessity. But I could be wrong.
- Kirby 17y agoPerhaps, but the perception of learning HTML being a barrier to entry was much smaller back then. People were excited to be part of something new, and didn't really balk at having to learn something. Totally different mentality today.
- tibbon 17y agoHTML was a bit easier, and few cared about web standards or accessibility- as long as it worked. We didn't have much javascript (and what we had was counters and similar), XML, RSS, Ajax, Rails sites, etc. Many of the sites were made in something like Frontpage even. There were templates and site makers, but also most people kept the stuff super simple. And just because it was more complex doesn't mean it wasn't important. It was the easiest thing to come along. Before that you had to set up a web server, buy a domain, etc...
- boredguy8 17y agoPerhaps a better analogy is MySpace, on account of the "copy/paste" approach people with little technical skill used to do things like add templates.
- brk 17y agoI've said several times that Facebook is the GeoCities of Web2.0 (and I ultimately think it will suffer the same fate). When GeoCities was in its prime it was pretty significant. Between some of the core features of GeoCities and add-ons like guestbooks, webrings, ICQ badges, etc., there was a good degree of "social networking", for the state of things at the time.