Before MySpace, before Facebook, there was GeoCities. I was surprised, when talking to Internet-addicted friends yesterday, at how few of them remembered the original web-based community for creating your own “home page”. Remember when the average person felt the terms “home page” and “web site” were interchangeable? What I had forgotten was what Yahoo paid for Geocities back in 1999: 3 billion dollars. That’s a billion dollars more than Google paid for YouTube, and it was ten years ago! You don’t need to be a web developer to realize it was the animated glitter unicorns and dancing Homer Simpson graphics that were part of Geocities demise. But in spite of how of easy it was to poke fun at Geocities, the fact is that the biggest difference between it and MySpace was, frankly, marketing. R.I.P., Geocities