Goodbye Geocities, cu l8tr

Sorry To See You Go, Free Personal Website

All good free things come to an end, and Geocities (part of whatever the hell Yahoo360 was supposed to be) is next on the list. I've had my Geocities site up since 1998 or so. It first held my first website ever, all about my wedding, and had tons of great pictures of guests wearing funny hats.

I used it to learn the basics of HTML and creating beveled, multi-state buttons in Photoshop, as much an exercise in fun and learning as it was about making my wedding viewable by all (can you remember when Flickr and the Kodak Gallery didn't exist?).

Next, I created an 'about me' site and learned advanced table syntax and even some Javascript. That pushed the boundaries of my scripting ability and reconfirmed that I was meant to market and find value in technology, not create technology. How can developers remember where everything is? Anyway, my personal profile site has been up for 9 years or so I think. Not sure what to do now, but I think I'll just copy my bio and published articles into a new blog post, take a few screenshots, and have a sorry and mournful goodbye.

What's Worse than Yahoo360? Well, the new Yahoo Profiles.
But, before I get the tissues, I wanted to heckle (scold?) Yahoo! for what could have been a great transition to get everyone to their 'new' preferred platform. They've failed miserably! Why would anyone commit to a platform that sucks all the way back to 2002?

This is is the hilarity, directly from their blog:

First you shut down Mash, now you shut down 360—why should I give profiles a shot?
We understand you might have doubts—in the past few years, you’ve seen a couple of social sites come and go, and it means a lot to us that you’ve stuck around while we’ve tweaked each experience. Know that we’re committed to having a universal profile across Yahoo!, and we’re committed to working with you to improve and evolve this profile to make sure it’s what YOU want to use. That doesn’t mean we can implement every piece of feedback you provide, but it does mean we’re listening, and we are going to do our best to make sure your interests are incorporated into future releases and versions of your profile.

What about customization and photos? On 360 I can change the look and feel and upload multiple photos—can I do this with profiles?
At this time, your new profile does not have all the features and functionality of your 360 profile. However, we are looking at incorporating new ways of expressing yourself through your profile.

In regards to uploading multiple photos, your profile on Yahoo! allows for only one primary photo for now. This is also something we’re looking at improving/expanding based on your feedback.

OK, you don't have nearly the same featureset, you can't upload multiple pictures, but we're working on it? You can do better than this, Melissa Daniels (and you NEED to do a lot better than this Carol Bartz)



So, after July 13, this blog is the new official freestylin' home of Tom Kuhr...until Google decides blogging shouldn't be free either...

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