Digital Dust in the Wind

Today, GeoCities is finally closing.  (For an excellent overview of this, read this piece from the LA Times.)

Ten years ago, GeoCities was the unquestionable king of online community and user-generated content.  No one was even close.  In fact, when I worked at GeoCities, we were not only in the top 5 sites in worldwide traffic, but we were, some analyst once said, 12% of the entire Internet.

Let me say that again:  GeoCities made up 12% of the whole Internet.

For me, this is deeply personal.  This is the place where I got my start in the Internet business, thrown into a role managing our e-commerce partnerships at a time when, I kid you not, my boss thought it best that we not put “e-commerce” on my business card because we didn’t want people to be confused.

Over the several years when GeoCities was really going (roughly ’95 to about ’00, when Yahoo’s neglect of the property began to be detrimental), people basically put their lives on GeoCities.  Sure, it was mawkish, silly, half-built, and crude in many ways, but it was very real.

It was the place where people for the first time went into virtual space and expressed themselves in a mass way and one of the first times in human history where anybody, anywhere could take free tools and ‘broadcast’ themselves in whatever way they saw fit.  We did that first.

The impulse to give people full, transparent access to self-expression and then to trust that among the resulting crazy, disorderly, cacophony there will be value is one of the most important, powerful and valuable things about the whole online movement.  We did that first, or at least, the first to provide it to millions.

No matter how big Facebook or its successors ever become, they will never be the first.

On behalf of my colleagues, I claim that for GeoCities.

But while I’m here reminiscing, it brings to mind a reality that’s easy to ignore sometimes, and that is that all power declines.  Today, we’re talking about the deletion of terabytes of GeoCities content, vanishing forever as though it never existed at all.

By nature, this must happen to everything, and it seems that with social networks, it happens pretty fast.  The same “viral effect” that makes something big sometimes reverses itself and tears things down pretty quickly too.  Just ask MySpace.

And that brings to mind a sonnet by Percy Shelley, which should be required reading for, well, everybody, but most especially for those who think it’s different this time, and that their power, the strength of their network effect, makes them unassailable, and that’s they’re doing something that’s never been done before:

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter’d visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp’d on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.