We can now say goodbye to Geocities.\u00c2\u00a0 It will go black at the end of October.\u00c2\u00a0 In its hay-day,\u00c2\u00a0it was much maligned by techies, and probably for good reason — even if one basic thrust of their problem has that sort of elitism that didn’t take into account a desire on the public not to become computer techies themselves.\u00c2\u00a0 Geocities misfired on a couple of occassions — a noxious little watermark, and then\u00c2\u00a0at the\u00c2\u00a0acquisition from Yahoo a claim of corporate copyright over everything anyone posted.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0In retrospect, Yahoo’s purchase of geocities was probably an unwise\u00c2\u00a0investment, a flush down the toilet of some millions of dollars, though it made sense at the time — geocities\u00c2\u00a0reportedly was\u00c2\u00a0the third most hit\u00c2\u00a0site on the web at one time.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0Geocities could have been something, had it evolved with the Internet Zietgist — on to something paralleling any blogger or facebook, but it didn’t evolve.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0So it\u00c2\u00a0was a relic, by-passed.\u00c2\u00a0 The thing lacked any dynamic features, encouraging a great deal of inaction and abondonment, and thus languishes its users into obscurity.<\/p>\n
I liked, or at least adapted a liking, to the neighborhood subdivision inherent in the sub-directorys for the web addresses.\u00c2\u00a0 “SoHo” “Coffeehouse” “7115”.\u00c2\u00a0 What an address!\u00c2\u00a0 It gave me a bit of amusement in “looking around the neighborhood”, where I found a lot of unused websites — people figuring\u00c2\u00a0putting up\u00c2\u00a0a website of their own was the thing to do, and then not doing anything with it.\u00c2\u00a0 Lack of dynamism.<\/p>\n
Then again… the subdirectories of these\u00c2\u00a0address… and an inability to communicate it to Law Enforcement… all on their end, I have to say…\u00c2\u00a0appeared to foster a feeling that I wasn’t playing things straight with them, which is never a good thing to engender with figures of Authority.<\/p>\n
I stood at the entrance of the police station, whisked off of my high school campus after a brief and horrifying little chat, and the officer asked, “What’s the address?”\u00c2\u00a0 And I answered.<\/p>\n
“dubba u dubba u dubba u dot geocities dot com slash SoHo slash Coffeehouse slash seventy-one fifteen slash diddley dash doot\u00c2\u00a0dot h t m l.”
\nI don’t know what he was expecting, but he couldn’t quite process such a thing.\u00c2\u00a0 After a\u00c2\u00a0short pause,\u00c2\u00a0he rustled about for a notepad and a pen, handed them to me, and asked “Could you write that down?”\u00c2\u00a0 Which I did.\u00c2\u00a0 And, after a pause, he parked me to the little holding cell, only convenient place available to dispose of me.<\/p>\n
A minute later, he came back.\u00c2\u00a0 Unlocked the door.\u00c2\u00a0 Handed me the paper.\u00c2\u00a0 “This is… the right address?”
\nI looked at the paper.\u00c2\u00a0 Saw that everything was in order.\u00c2\u00a0 Handed in back, nodding my head, “Yep!”
\n\u00c2\u00a0He handed it back, saying “Are you sure?”\u00c2\u00a0 I looked down again.\u00c2\u00a0 Grabbed my pen (which I had been impulsively clicking for the duration of this police visit), drew three lines above the “C” in “Coffeehouse” and “S” and “H” in “SoHo”, and handed it back.\u00c2\u00a0
\n“It’s … um… Case Sensitive.”
\nHuh.<\/p>\n
He returned in a minute.\u00c2\u00a0 Opened the door.\u00c2\u00a0 Summoned me.\u00c2\u00a0 And asked, “Why don’t you… um… come back with me and type it yourself?”
\nIn retrospect, there probably wasn’t too much harm in having me do so in the first place.\u00c2\u00a0 But there was no protocol for this, so the police was in a very real way was playing this in an\u00c2\u00a0ad hoc manner.\u00c2\u00a0 As it were, I entered the office.\u00c2\u00a0 Another officer, the other’s Superior I presume, rolled his seat back, and let me lean over with just enough room to type the address on his keyboard.\u00c2\u00a0 There was a false start in getting the page up\u00c2\u00a0as it clicked to one of the barely wrong addresses he had been typing in to no avail,\u00c2\u00a0and so came\u00c2\u00a0a stern and accusatory question\u00c2\u00a0— “Why don’t you type in the address that you actually use to get to your page?” — which was answered by\u00c2\u00a0the page coming up.\u00c2\u00a0 I was ushered back out so they could apprise the situation anew.<\/p>\n
It turned out all right, of course.\u00c2\u00a0 Me?\u00c2\u00a0 Not a Serial Killer.\u00c2\u00a0 Good to know!\u00c2\u00a0 But I am trying to imagine how these things might work in this day and age.\u00c2\u00a0 I don’t know.\u00c2\u00a0Do schools make it a point to survelliance their students’ Internet accumulations?\u00c2\u00a0 (Quick google search.\u00c2\u00a0 Around here<\/a>?)\u00c2\u00a0 And how does one answer the question of handing an address for a long-gone facebook post — isn’t that a bunch of “&”s and random numbers and “^”s, something a bit more confusing than three slashes, three upper-case letters, and a dash (which, I suppose, everyone is used to by now).<\/p>\n