News

Let's imagine, for a moment, that the year is 2019, and we have dragged ourselves into the future with a minimum of apocalypse.

Picture yourself sitting in front of your news-o-scope (my patent is pending) when up pops word that a website you were really into a decade ago is shutting down.

“Facebook!” you exclaim. “I remember Facebook! I posted 250,000 pictures to Facebook. My lost youth!”

If it sounds improbable that everything you've piled into Facebook might evaporate in just 10 years, then consider: One of the biggest websites of the late 1990s is about to get deleted.

At the end of October, Yahoo will pull the plug on GeoCities, the service that more than 1 million people used to set up web pages. On Oct. 27, the whole thing will simply cease to exist. It will, as we say in the industry, go poof.

This poofing business does not bode well. Lately, there's been so much discussion about the permanence of information – especially the embarrassing kind – that we have overlooked the fact that it can also disappear. At a time when we're throwing all kinds of data and memories onto free websites, it's a blunt reminder that the future can bring unwelcome surprises.

Ten years ago, you could have called GeoCities the garish, beating heart of the Web. It was one of the first sites that threw its doors open to users and invited them to populate its pages according to their own creativity. At a time when the Web was still daunting, it encouraged laypeople to set up their own homepages free of charge.

And that's exactly what laypeople did. GeoCities exploded, turning into a gaudy carnival of websites devoted to everything from Civil War history to ichthyology, from quilting to Quaaludes. The place was designed around an urban metaphor, divided into cutely named “neighbourhoods” according to content. Nobody seemed to police what went where, which meant you could explore without knowing what you were looking for, or what you might stumble over next.

(As a cloistered university student, I recall trawling through the American political pages and meeting my first bigot, who had written up his unpleasant views on sexual politics – all of them in lime-green type on a black background. I was fascinated. We corresponded. To this day, I fondly remember the time when there was only one bigot on the Internet, and he answered his e-mail.) Alas, the site never excelled at the money-making thing and its ham-fisted attempts to turn a buck drove users away. In 1999, Yahoo purchased GeoCities for $3.57-billion in stock, which turned out to be $3.57-billion too much. The world moved on, and GeoCities faded into a ghost town.

And now, it's curtains. GeoCities won't disappear entirely. The Internet Archive – a non-profit foundation based in San Francisco dedicated to backing up the Web for posterity's sake – is trying to salvage as much as it can before the deadline hits. At least one other independent group is trying to do the same. But this complicates things, because it puts GeoCities users' data into the hands of an unaccountable third party.

Money-losing websites aren't exactly novelties. Smaller sites flicker in and out of existence like those bugs that only have 18 hours to mate before they die. But it's disconcerting to see a big site – one that, long ago, was one of the most popular on the Web – not just fade into obscurity, but come to its end game.

It bring to light some truths about data that are easily overlooked. Websites are like buildings: you can't just abandon them indefinitely and expect them to keep working. For one thing, that electronic storage isn't free. Storing files requires media that degrade and computers that fail and power that needs paying for.

And data futures are more important than ever. In an immediate sense, think of how many photos you've shovelled onto Facebook lately. Or e-mails into Gmail or docs into Google or Tweets into Twitter. As I type this, I'm uploading a batch of photos to Flickr, a photo-sharing service that's also owned by Yahoo.

It is clear that online storage is taking over more and more tasks that were the domain of personal computers. There is even a buzzword for the trend: “cloud computing.”

It seems unlikely that Facebook or Google or Yahoo or Microsoft will crumble to dust any time soon. And as we feed their gaping maws with ever more personal data – social connections, correspondence, photos and work documents that may not be backed on hard drives – it's easy to get lulled into thinking they're too big to fail.

It's not hard to save a quick copy of an old GeoCities page and walk away. But what happens to your thousands of photos and photo captions and comments on photos, should the future prove equally unkind to Facebook?

Where do your Gmail messages, YouTube clips and Google Documents go in the event that Google's search-based advertising model – its golden egg – doesn't survive the introduction of my news-o-scope?

Companies can promise a great many things, and I'm willing to believe most of them. But they can't promise to be there forever. We should stop whistling on, doe-eyed, pretending like they have.

Follow Ivor on Twitter at @ivortossell