GeoCities Bot

By Noah McKee and Tara Conway

When contemplating what to create for the project, the deceptively simple prompt of “do something on the web about the web” was immediately reminiscent of an assignment from earlier in the semester that asked us to answer the question “what is the internet?” While this is a vast question, when comparing our own responses, we both reflected on our early experiences with the internet and computers. With this in mind, we made the decision to create a Twitter bot based on this concept using Cheap Bots, Done Quick! which uses Tracery as a generative grammar. We wanted to create a bot that was archival of old websites and contemplated various ideas such as Wayback Machine links among other ideas, before settling on creating one based on the now-defunct web hosting service, GeoCities.

First started in November of 1994, the site was originally named Beverly Hills Internet before being renamed GeoCities. The site allowed users to create websites and browse other websites by theme or interest. Originally, users selected a themed “city” in which to list the hyperlinks to their page. For example “Petsburgh” was a neighborhood for pet-related pages. Unfortunately, after its acquisition by Yahoo! on January 28th of 1999, this unique feature was eradicated in favor of using the Yahoo! usernames in the URLs. Just over a decade later in April of 2009, Yahoo! announced that it would end the United States GeoCities service on October 26, 2009 (though the Japan version of the service continued until March 31 of 2019). Prior to its termination, the site hosted around 38 million user-created pages. Due to the site’s significance to internet history, many projects ensued in an attempt to preserve this important aspect of the web, alongside the creation of similar web hosting services in homage such as Neocities.

While it's unfortunate that such a vital part of web history is now removed, its departure and subsequent preservation projects create a platform for easily accessible archives such as One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age and the accompanying One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age Photo Op, which posts screenshots of old Geocities home pages, processed from oldest to newest; which is where we sourced our images and captions for our bot from. The bot, @geocitiesbot posts once a day from a selection of pre-generated tweets. We also created a header with a compilation of homepages and a profile picture inspired by the old web for the account. If you are interested, the source code for the bot can be viewed here.