But even with the small space that GeoCities provided a user, some ambitious pages were built.
FORBES: Resurrecting 'The Deleted City' Of The Internet's Early Pioneers
However, GeoCities is a top ten web site and investors are rewarding heavily trafficked sites.
Though it started from a very different place, GeoCities has many of the same aims.
Founded by former GeoCities employees Rich Rygg and Scott Daniel, HipGeo launched its app in January.
"We give people the opportunity to connect with people of similar interests, " GeoCities founder David Bohnett says.
Bohnett hasn't come close to replicating his success with GeoCities, but he has had a few wins.
GeoCities enabled groups of people to form communities on the Web, and it caught on like wildfire.
Before that, the University of Illinois trained engineer worked for three years at GeoCities, before it was acquired by Yahoo in 1999.
The first version of Sobig prompted infected computers to download Trojans that had been invisibly parked at Geocities, Yahoo's free Web-hosting service.
We were of course more than happy to oblige, especially since we just stopped hosting Engadget on Geocities a few days ago.
ENGADGET: HOW-TO: Enable web based viewing and remote control over your TiVo
Bohnett, 47, spent 15 years in the consulting and software worlds before founding GeoCities in late 1994, when Internet usage was nascent.
Two of the best-known prospects are GeoCities, a fast-growing community of personal Web sites, and Multex Systems, which offers on-line research for investors.
Last year, Tumblr offered a model that provided native advertising on its service, a very different approach from the generic banner ads Geocities had.
By the time the good guys had shut down Web sites hosting Sobig's malicious code at Geocities, Sobig already had gone through a sixth version.
But the success of GeoCities and the Globe indicates that many Web surfers are looking for something that they aren't getting from their access company.
Geocities was a four billion dollar acquisition and the same happened.
True, there have been some successful Internet company IPOs this summer, such as GeoCities, which was up over 120 percent from its Nasdaq debut on Aug. 11.
Back in 1999, Geocities had trouble monetizing its audience, slapping low-priced ads all over the site in a desperate attempt to monetize as much of its traffic as it could.
When the Internet was young, before Blogger, WordPress, and Movable Type enabled the public to easily publish volumes of information to the world, sites like GeoCities provided a free home.
FORBES: Resurrecting 'The Deleted City' Of The Internet's Early Pioneers
's (nasdaq: YHOO - news - people ) Geocities and Tripod, a personal Web service from Terra-Lycos (nasdaq: TRLY - news - people ).
What the Globe and other Web ventures, ranging from America Online to Santa Monica, California-based GeoCities, are doing is not so much creating community as providing tools for the creation of community.
At the time of the Yahoo acquisition, Geocities had focused on monetization and let scale grow on its own, making a few mistakes along the way in terms of figuring out monetization at scale.
Ten years later in 2009, as other metaphors of the internet (such as the social network) had taken over, and the homesteaders had left their properties vacant after migrating to Facebook, Geocities was shutdown and deleted.
FORBES: Resurrecting 'The Deleted City' Of The Internet's Early Pioneers
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