Yahoo GeoCities Japan

» see geocities.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

yahoo geocities japan was a parallel-universe geocities for me. by the time it shut down in march 2019, i had not visited a geocities page of any branch in maybe fifteen years, but the original us geocities had been the default texture of mid-'90s personal pages i hit while clicking around webrings on a 33.6k modem in '99 ankara. the japanese branch was a different operation under a different parent on a different domain (geocities.jp instead of geocities.com), launched in 1997 by yahoo japan with separate user accounts and a separate page-builder. it kept running for ten years after the us version was killed in 2009.

yahoo japan launched geocities japan in 1997 as a partnership with the original geocities inc, with a localized domain and a japanese-language editor. yahoo (the us parent) acquired the original geocities in 1999 for 3.57 billion dollars in stock, which folded the us branch into yahoo's product line. the japanese branch was already operated by yahoo japan, a separately-listed company majority-owned by softbank with yahoo us as a minority investor, so the japanese geocities did not migrate when yahoo did its product-line consolidation. the two services kept growing in parallel, with japanese teen and otaku culture building millions of geocities.jp pages through the early 2000s.

the us geocities was killed october 26 2009 in the post-acquisition rationalization yahoo went through after firing jerry yang. the japanese branch lived on through that round and through every later round of yahoo cuts, partly because yahoo japan was a separate company that did not have to listen to sunnyvale's product roadmap. for ten years geocities.jp was the only operational geocities anywhere in the world, with a userbase that had stayed loyal to the platform while the english-speaking web moved to wordpress and twitter.

yahoo japan announced the shutdown october 1 2018 with a six-month wind-down. the cited reasons were "profitability and technological issues" in the announcement language, which translated to a host of legacy concerns: a pre-https codebase, a page-builder that was not mobile-friendly, an ad market that no longer paid for free-hosting bandwidth. the service ended march 31 2019 jst (april 1 utc), exactly twenty-two years after launch. archive team kicked off a preservation project that ran through the shutdown window with sustained crawl pressure on the geocities.jp domain.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the long tail ~

the japanese geocities looked a lot like the us version but felt locally different. the city-and-neighborhood metaphor of the original ("you live in geocities, your address is /SiliconValley/2345") had been kept in the japanese branch, with japanese neighborhood names mapped to topic categories. there was a tokyo for technology pages and a hollywood for movie fans, plus a long tail of localized neighborhoods covering everything else. the japanese branch leaned heavier into otaku and doujinshi culture than the us version, with extensive fan-art and anime-fan-site networks that had no real english equivalent.

the page-builder geocities japan provided was simpler than the geocities.com pagebuilder of the late '90s. it allowed direct html editing with a wysiwyg fallback, image uploads up to a per-site quota, plus counter widgets and guestbook widgets in the japanese-web tradition that had outlasted those features in the english-speaking web. the look-and-feel of a typical geocities.jp page in 2018 was closer to a '99 us geocities page than to anything else still operational, which made it a kind of accidental time capsule of late-'90s web design choices that had been preserved in japan past the point where they had vanished elsewhere.

~ the day it died ~

march 31 2019 jst was a sunday in japan. the shutdown happened at midnight local time, with the geocities.jp domain redirecting to a yahoo japan landing page that explained the closure and pointed users to alternative hosting options. more than a million homepages were affected by the shutdown according to yahoo japan's own press numbers, with a significant fraction being abandoned-for-years pages whose owners had not logged in for a decade or more.

the archive team preservation push had been running for the previous six months at the time of the cutoff. crawl progress was somewhere around 60 percent of the public geocities.jp pages by the cutoff date, with the remaining pages either behind login or rate-limited by yahoo japan's anti-scraping defenses. the internet archive's wayback machine captured what it could on its own crawl schedule. between the two efforts a meaningful but incomplete archive of late-'90s and early-'00s japanese web culture survived the shutdown.

~ what survived ~

what got preserved is a different kind of internet than what archive.org preserved from the us geocities. the japanese branch had less english-language fan culture and more localized doujinshi and jpop fan-site material that does not show up in the us archive in significant quantity. for non-japanese-speaking researchers the archive is harder to work through than its us counterpart, but for the japanese-speaking community it is a substantial chunk of the country's late-'90s amateur-web history preserved past the point where the host disappeared.

the last public geocities went dark on a tokyo midnight in march 2019. the brand that had launched in 1994 as beverly hills internet, with its city-and-neighborhood pitch and its free-hosting promise, ended on the other side of the pacific in a service the original founders had never directly run. the geocities lineage is now entirely archival, with the only operational successor being whatever pages individual users migrated to wordpress or to the smaller japanese-hosting tier that absorbed the rest.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »