Ruud Hein on Geocities' Closure
"There are, I believe, two reasons why the Geocities model failed in popularity. And I say Geocities but I could also say Blogger or LiveJournal…
One, we don’t want to built web sites, easy page makers or not. Making new pages, figuring out where or how to add them to the navigation – not cool.
Two, audience. Family and friends we proudly told about our site came once. Then the incentive was gone and they didn’t come anymore."
Good insights on how the web evolves. Online communities to date have been a cyclical business. Consumers are fickle. GeoCities didn't make the turn and the same may happen one day to Twitter and Facebook. However, there's nothing right now on the horizon it seems. So it might be awhile before we see a new class emerge.
Comments 5 Comments
These walled gardens will become unpopular for the same reasons walled garden Internet (AOL, CompuServe, etc.) became unpopular.
The convergence of that with single point dashboards such as Raindrop will have us branch out down the line; liberate us, if you will.
TweetDeck and Seesmic Desktop are very early peeks into what's coming: distributed social networking.
I was involved with a very popular site on Geocities, www.buckleysurfers.com (from around 1997 onwards) and the bandwidth limitations killed us.
It was pretty easy to set up a site, pretty easy to update and maintain content, pretty awful when they prevented people from looking at it.
It's like Facebook in the early days - they had a limit on friends, which curbed participation. Once this limitation was gone, popularity exploded. Why on earth provide an unrealistically low limitation? Who does it benefit apart from the genius who invented a "freemium" business model that was too short sighted?