Geocities is dead. As of yesterday, October 26th, Yahoo has pulled the plug on the original free and easy web-hosting service. For a lot of people older than twenty, Geocites represented their first crack at building their own website full of animated Under Construction GIFs, photos of Duran Duran and updates about the family.

And now, all those thousands and thousands of websites are no more, killed off by the capricious hands of evolving technology, time and Yahoo. Or are they all really gone for good?

Earlier this year, when Yahoo announced they’d be unplugging Geocities in the near future, Archive Team initiated the Geocities Project. The project started in April 2009, and ran full steam until yesterday. Its goal? To download as much of Geocities as possible before the lights were turned out. And that’s a pretty big task. Nobody knows for sure exactly how big Geocities was, but the Archive Team folks estimate it’s somewhere around 23 million webpages, representing approximately 10 Terabytes of data (about 10,000 GB). If you want to try to find your old website, you can give it a go at http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://put/your/url/here. So far the live archive is a few months behind though, so don’t be surprised if the site you’re looking for isn’t available yet.

One more way that a semblance of Geocities will survive, is through the Wayback Machine on the Internet Archive. For those not familiar with it, the Wayback Machine “captures” websites at various points in their history. You can find many old sites there, at various stages of their history, but it’s not an exhaustive record.

And if you’re still feeling nostalgic, but not nostalgic enough to actually go and wade through dozens of decade-old websites, then check out this Comedy Central article Goodbye Geocities: 7 Retro Things We’ll Miss Forever. Most of us may not shed a tear for the loss of those under construction banners, visitor counters and guestbooks, but it’s still comforting to know that someone is saving Geocities, the now-historical artifact of the evolution of the internet.

Funny isn’t it. It took nearly the same amount of time for Google to become the dominant force that it is today both as a search engine and more, as it took Microsoft and Yahoo to finally hammer out a partnership aimed at dominating the search engine and more market. Microsoft is confident that the release of their new Bing search engine will re-assert their presence online and have partnered with Yahoo, the second largest engine after google, to leverage their product and brand. Interesting that just as Google begins to produce software for personal computers, a market traditionally dominated by Microsoft, then MS turns around and sticks it to Google where they’ve been most dominant.

Oh to be a fly on the wall in these people’s boardrooms. I wonder if they have a Risk board or Axis and Aliies out on the table? My advice to Microsoft/Yahoo as a humble technology and software blogger would be to try something new. Make something new. It’s what’s made Google so dominant. They kept on introducing new products, new features, new apps, and lots of them. Some of them didn’t stick, but some really did. Google Maps is a great example. Even the products that Google is releasing to move into Microsoft territories are more innovative than Microsoft’s. New features, new uses etc.

Microsoft suffers from a lack of imagination, something that Google has embraced as a key pillar in their strategy. There are plenty of search engines, a few of them are popular, one of them is utterly dominant. If I were a business, I wouldn’t try and catch up with Google when I could spend money to innovate and release a product that people instantly gravitated to, people will need to be pulled away from Google. Another search engine, just a search engine, won’t do that. With all that money and all that power one would think that Microsoft wouldn’t try to reinvent the wheel, but here they go. Maybe they have to? These guys aren’t stupid. I can’t be smarter than Microsoft Corporation? Can I?

With the release of Chrome, Google is aggressively moving into Microsoft’s territory. If Google is able to muscle into that market, they put themselves in a strong position for whatever comes down the pipe. What do most people use their computers for? The internet. Google has the internet part down- their brand is the internet. If they can get the platforms for PC down too then their options open up even more to produce more products similar to Wave and Chrome.  Seamlessly integrating the things that people use their computers for both offline and online is where Google appears to be looking ahead to.

Once again if I were Microsoft I’d be digging in a trench around PC platforms and I would’ve been working hard to make an OS that didn’t crash or jam up for the past five years instead of releasing a search engine to challenge Google once they owned 70-80% of global traffic. Focus on your strengths, admit your weaknesses, innovate, innovate, innovate. And above all else, admit that things change fast in this world. A 5 to 10 year head start is all Google needed to put them so far ahead in this category that no one is catching up anytime soon.

I’m curious to see how this plays out. I can’t imagine it being too successful for MS/Yahoo. Maybe in the short run the stocks will go up, but in the long run I think they’ve picked the wrong battle.