[wayne]

I remember it was controversial and "the beginning of the end" when you no longer had to host at a 4-digit number and could, gasp, use a string for your URL: www.geocities.com/mywebpage instead of www.geocities.com/Athens/Acropolis/5372 . The "Acropolis" is because the main top-level "neighborhoods" quickly filled up so you had to pick a sub-neighborhood, making your URL even longer.

Another fun aspect of all this is all their neighborhoods had unpaid "community leaders". The hot neighborhoods got tons of leaders so your in was to pick an "up and coming" neighborhood and apply to be a leader there. All the neighborhoods had themes and rules which the community leaders enforced but they weren't strictly enforced. When GeoCities IPO'd, they threw all their community leaders a few pre-IPO shares and swag, which was super fun and appreciated as a high school student. :)

[bdcravens]

So basically a precursor to Reddit