4 ms·

Could somebody explain how it makes sense for a few nerds to do this, but it does not for yahoo? If geocities was eating that much of their bandwidth (which I

by blhack 17y ago

Could somebody explain how it makes sense for a few nerds to do this, but it does not for yahoo? If geocities was eating that much of their bandwidth (which I doubt), couldn't they advertise on it? I just don't understand how a few geeks can like this enough to buy (or scavenge from their closet) the necessary equipment to do a project like this, but a multi-billion-dollar technology powerhouse like Yahoo! cannot.

jacquesm 17y ago
My own guess is that they wanted to push the millions of GeoCities users to become customers for Y!s paid hosting service. But to me that smacks of bait-and-switch, if you buy up an advertising supported hosting service you should not change the basic business model that made it a success.
- axod 17y ago
  I agree, but markets do change. What was a successful business model in 2000 may not be viable in 2009.
  - jacquesm 17y ago
    Bandwidth costs are actually a small fraction of what they were back then, it should be easier today.
icey 17y ago
It makes sense to me; there is little to no profit expectation for Yahoo with regards to GeoCities at this point. Since they are a for-profit company, that's at least a little bit important. I'm not saying GeoCities couldn't make money, but you have to remember that there is a bureaucracy charge for every big company that wants to maintain software. If there is a developer on the project, there has to be a manager. If there's a manager on the project, there will be reporting requirements. If there are reporting requirements, there must be an analyst, etc. It's easy for me to see Yahoo considering this not worth their time; I don't think there were any nefarious intentions at all.
NikkiA 17y ago
At a guess, Liability. For Yahoo to state that they'd be keeping an archive of geocities up, there would be legal issues about what kind of guarantees they're giving, legal state of the sign-up 'contract' that people entered into when they started their geocities page, legal requirements for proving someone is who they say they are when they suddenly say 'hey, delete my page I created in 1997, btw, I moved 8 times and changed my name 3 times', how that all fits in with EU data protection laws, etc etc. Geeks doing it makes it a 'fun project', with no expectation of those legal issues (not that some of them don't exist still). If it vanishes overnight, it's a loss of something that wasn't guaranteed, For an individual to do something is a different endevour from a large corporation doing something, and in this case, the financial burden of keeping a read-only archive of geocities might have been too much for yahoo. Or perhaps they never even contemplated it :)
mikeryan 17y ago
A bit of a sidenote. Way (way) back in the day when geocities and angelfire were the only free ways to have a website they kept putting ads on peoples pages. This led to a bunch of different scripts and hacks being created that would hide the ads. There then seemed to be an ongoing battle between the hackers and site devs on how to insert html code that couldn't be hidden via JS/CSS/HTML

by blhack 17y ago

jacquesm 17y ago

My own guess is that they wanted to push the millions of GeoCities users to become customers for Y!s paid hosting service. But to me that smacks of bait-and-switch, if you buy up an advertising supported hosting service you should not change the basic business model that made it a success.

axod 17y ago
I agree, but markets do change. What was a successful business model in 2000 may not be viable in 2009.
- jacquesm 17y ago
  Bandwidth costs are actually a small fraction of what they were back then, it should be easier today.

icey 17y ago

It makes sense to me; there is little to no profit expectation for Yahoo with regards to GeoCities at this point. Since they are a for-profit company, that's at least a little bit important. I'm not saying GeoCities couldn't make money, but you have to remember that there is a bureaucracy charge for every big company that wants to maintain software. If there is a developer on the project, there has to be a manager. If there's a manager on the project, there will be reporting requirements. If there are reporting requirements, there must be an analyst, etc. It's easy for me to see Yahoo considering this not worth their time; I don't think there were any nefarious intentions at all.

NikkiA 17y ago

At a guess, Liability. For Yahoo to state that they'd be keeping an archive of geocities up, there would be legal issues about what kind of guarantees they're giving, legal state of the sign-up 'contract' that people entered into when they started their geocities page, legal requirements for proving someone is who they say they are when they suddenly say 'hey, delete my page I created in 1997, btw, I moved 8 times and changed my name 3 times', how that all fits in with EU data protection laws, etc etc. Geeks doing it makes it a 'fun project', with no expectation of those legal issues (not that some of them don't exist still). If it vanishes overnight, it's a loss of something that wasn't guaranteed, For an individual to do something is a different endevour from a large corporation doing something, and in this case, the financial burden of keeping a read-only archive of geocities might have been too much for yahoo. Or perhaps they never even contemplated it :)

mikeryan 17y ago

A bit of a sidenote. Way (way) back in the day when geocities and angelfire were the only free ways to have a website they kept putting ads on peoples pages. This led to a bunch of different scripts and hacks being created that would hide the ads. There then seemed to be an ongoing battle between the hackers and site devs on how to insert html code that couldn't be hidden via JS/CSS/HTML