GeoCities Launches

NOV 15 1994 · 12:00

The GeoCities branding banner served from geocities.com itself, the suburb-themed Web 1.0 city that gave amateurs a home. Place: Beverly Hills Internet, Beverly Hills, California Figures: David Bohnett, co-founder · John Rezner, co-founder Beverly Hills Internet, a small Los Angeles ISP, launches a free-hosting product called GeoCities on 15 November 1994. The organizing metaphor is geographic: signups pick a NEIGHBORHOOD (Hollywood for entertainment, SiliconValley for tech, Athens for philosophy, Tokyo for anime, RodeoDrive for shopping) and receive a street address inside it. Two megabytes of disk, an FTP account, no charge. By 1997 the company drops the Beverly Hills Internet name, rebrands as GeoCities, and crosses one million HOMESTEADERS. The neighborhoods will be quietly retired in 1999 in favor of flat URLs, but the early naming convention geocities.com/Hollywood/Lot/4242 survives in millions of inbound links and is the reason every Wayback capture of the era reads like an address book of the imaginary. Video: A retrospective on the neighborhood model, the homesteader boom, and the Yahoo collapse, with screen-captures of original 1996-era pages.