If you were aged 12-21 at some point between the years of 1995 and 2005, the chances are that you had at least attempted to create a GeoCities website of your own. For those who can't remember or just plain don't know what GeoCities was, think about the very most garishly decorated MySpace page, but instead of following a set profile, the user could choose any format they liked, with a multitude of pages. Yes, GeoCities was, in a way, the first major social networking tool, as it allowed anyone and everyone to have themselves a tasty slice of internet pie. What this meant was that a great deal of the time of a huge amount of internet users was swallowed up by creating spectacularly badly styled websites about Doom walkthroughs and cats. Whilst the latter is still pretty prevalent, the charm of GeoCities was for pages that matched the former; you could spend days wading through the vast masses of fan pages for anything and everything you could think of, which was particularly appealing to gamers, fans of film, and, most definitely, all things nerdy. GeoCities went the final journey in 2009, largely because everyone was now able to broadcast anything they wanted through Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, and all of it without the danger of using Comic Sans at every turn. Unfortunately, Japan is now the only place that you can still access and build your own tacky website, so this one truly is dead and buried for everyone else; but we'll always have the memories, those bright green font over a space-themed background memories.
