It’s February 27, 2025 IRL and January 1, 2009 in One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age timeline. The last year of GeoCities has started. The closure announcement will come on April 23, 2009.
Those who follow the project know that we have 381 934 websites in the archive. To the moment we posted screenshots of 279 310 of them. 102 000 left. One can ask how it can be that more than a quarter of the archived pages was last updated in the last 10 months of the Geocities existence?
I first found this oddity six years ago, while collecting materials for the post about the 10th anniversary of the closure announcement “Sorry to see you go”. My first thought was that the reason was that after the announcement many rushed to their pages to make the last changes or to leave a farewell note. It did happen, but not on such a scale.
A closer examination showed that there are ~ 50 000 pages that were updated in 10 days (in between April 25 and May 5, 2009) and that in these cases “last updated” date was just wrong. the mistake happened while grabbing the files from the server in 2009. The websites are from all the possible years, according to their content and the style.
So, if you were following our Tumblr for years and made the slow travel from 1995 to 2009, get ready for a new achronological adventure. But in the meantime:
Happy New 2009 !
Related:
Eternal 2004
On the eve of Y2K
Happy 1999!