Remember Geocities and Tripod? Remember how huge they were in the late 90’s?
I saw a blah.tripod.com address on the back of a beat-up pickup truck on the way home today – a cheap web hosting account for a small business, of course. Brought me back a decade or so, when Geocities and Tripod were the MySpace and YouTube of the day.
The funny thing is, when you go to their pages right now, they’re basically selling hosting. Only Tripod has a mini, after-thought, bottom-of-the-page listing of member sites.
Just imagine what these properties could have done if they would have had the foresight to be a Digg, a Newsvine, even a Bloglines or Technorati. If there’s anything those companies have taught us, it’s that there’s gold in the long tail.
Tripod and Geocities traffic shows just a slight downward trend over the past half a year, but that’s misleading. When the rising tide that should lift all boats is not lifting yours, you probably have a leaky hull.
How the mighty have fallen.
[tags] geocities, tripod, long tail, social, aggregator, john koetsier [/tags]