Mark Zuckerberg is not joking when he says Facebook is the sixth most populated country on earth. It is a country. We build a space in it, have friends in it, work in it and love in it. Are our online properties not a home, in a sense?

Perhaps it’s just me. I don’t really have a childhood home the way most people do. I had many, all around the world. When I moved out from my parents’, I lived in many spaces, but these always felt temporary, too. I am a creature of motion. The places that were always a constant for me, the ones that I devoted time and energy into making mine, have all been online. I have made a few moves here, too, sometimes taking all my things with me, and sometimes leaving it all behind as one does when they’re walking out of a life that no longer suits them, with nothing but their name.

I can count these occasions.

My childhood homes, on the other hand—well, they require more than all the digits on that other hand.

I LOVE PARIS IN THE SPRINGTIME

Yahoo is pulling the plug on its free personal home page service, GeoCities.

For those who were not around in the early days of the web, GeoCities was the original social networking site. Only clunkier, devoid of most features you use without a second thought on Facebook—and on dial-up.

Back in the days when basic knowledge of HTML was required to carve a space on the web, and when very few people really knew it, GeoCities gave us n00b pioneers the ability to get ourselves started without too many complications, as well as helped us connect with others through “neighborhoods,” a feature of GeoCities that subdivided its users into categories (Paris for romance and the arts, SoHo for the hipsters and the arts, SunsetStrip for music, SouthBeach for intensive socializing, etc.).

It’s nothing new now, but back then, it was revolutionary. In 1997, a little after I joined, GeoCities was the fifth most popular site on the interwebz.

I don’t remember the kind of stuff I put up there now, but I do remember the wonder of discovery as I began, for the first time, to make, what I felt, was a home online. Before this moment, I had “rented” on bulletin boards and chat rooms. This, however, was like “buying.” It meant long-term. I made my little Paris place home.

(Of course it was Paris. I was a fetus, give me a break.)

THE END OF AN ERA

Perhaps more than places of residence, spaces online are like lovers. We enjoy many people who touch our lives, but there are only a number of them that really change us so deeply, and teach us so much, that we remember them forever.

In a sense, GeoCities was that. It may not have been the moody codependent relationship I had with Diaryland, or the drama-filled, torrid affair I had with LiveJournal or the wild, no-strings-attached fling I’ve been having with Wordpress, or the warm marriage I enjoy on this self-hosted blog—but it shaped me.

Maybe it was my first crush.

And now, it’s gone. Yahoo, which bought GeoCities in 1999 for a sweet $2.9 million, will be closing GeoCities later this year. Their statement doesn’t say much else in the way of whys or hows, but that isn’t necessary.

We’ve grown up. That first crush doesn’t make our heart melt when we see it or think of it. Instead, it fills us with a nostalgia. Not for the thing itself, but for who we were when we were first discovering it. That wide-eyed wonder, where expression meets exposure: one part confessional, one part art exhibit, one part life with a dash of dream.

Everything has the power to trigger memory. A sunset, a song, a scent. And now, a site.

THE CITY AND THE PICKAX

There is always a city. There is always a civilization. There is always a barbarian with a pickax. Sometimes you are the city, sometimes you are the civilization, but to become that city, that civilization, you once took a pickax and destroyed what you hated, and what you hated was what you did not understand.

– Jeanette Winterson, The Powerbook

So long, GeoCities. You may have already been forgotten, but our Facebooks, Tumblrs and Twitters will forever rest on the ruins of your temples.

More ruminations across the web:

As URLs Go By by Atherton Bartelby
Because, much like I can vividly recall the scene outside of my apartment’s balcony when my brother told me over the telephone that our mother had died, or describe in minute detail the scents that filled my nostrils as I lost my virginity, so too can I recall precisely which design forums I was frequenting when my father died, or which blog I was maintaining when I was told that my first friend to die of AIDS had just been diagnosed with it, or exactly how many subdomains resided on my website when I experienced the most soul-destroying breakup of my life.

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