Geocities, founded in 1995, was a colossus of the dotcom era and an early example of a mass-market social web platform. When it eventually died off (under the care of Yahoo!, unsurprisingly) lots of people like me were snobbish about it: who cares about Geocities, this garish place where internet newbies experimented with starfield backgrounds, “under construction” gifs and animated cursors?

The sort of thing you’d expect to come across on Geocities

But while yesterday’s trends can seem like naff ephemera that should be wholly eradicated from the cultural memory banks, they often accrue historical value over the years and eventually come to enrich our understanding of an otherwise obscure period of time. So it’s good that some people work hard to preserve dying web platforms which, as aesthetically offensive as they might seem, will one day become major historical records of contemporary culture.

A couple of these people over at One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age have been going through the Geocities archives, and they recently took a look at how Geocities changed in the aftermath of the September 11th attacks towards the end of 2001

…It’s the time when Harry Potter fanfic starts to get illustrated with stills from the film, not pictures from the book; when N’Sync fandom gets more vibrant than Backstreet Boys fandom; when you see a bit more of cat web sites than one year before, but still more dog lovers are out there; when GeoCities users call Yahoo! names for suspending their sites for too much traffic.

However, these are just side notes. The most striking content from 2001 is websites that were made or modified in reaction to September 11. Up until today I looked at 97 of them, and there will be more sad, angry, devastated, patriotic, conspiracy pages appearing in the coming months.

I recommend going to the article and taking a look through the screenshots.To modern eyes, there’s a kind of poignancy in the more jingoistic fighter-jet/bald-eagle stuff, given how the response to 9/11 ultimately turned out for America. And many of the sites actually shut down after the attacks, their creators no longer sure that their fanfic and other geeky material was necessary or even appropriate in a world turned suddenly serious.

Smozzy is a new Android app (for US T-Mobile customers only) with a novel approach to getting round prohibitive data costs. Instead of downloading web content in the traditional manner, the app uses SMS and MMS messaging to get websites on to your phone. So if you’ve got an unlimited SMS/MMS deal, you can browse the web for free.

Of course, there are a couple of drawbacks. The first is that T-Mobile are almost certainly going to shut this party down as soon as they notice streams of MMS attachments, each packed with HTML, CSS and Javascript, hurtling across their network towards the phones of cheekily grinning customers. And the second is that the user experience will almost certainly be terrible.

I feel qualified to say this because I’ve experienced something similar. Back in 1998, working in an office with email but no web access, I started using a bizarre method for looking at websites. It involved emailing requests for web pages to an email address which would then reply to you with a huge bunch of uuencoded data. You would then convert that data into HTML source, which you could then view as a web document in your browser.

Uuencoding was an early way of embedding binary data in text-based communications, and it was probably the most low-tech method I’ve ever used to access the web. Often the desired web page’s source code would be split over multiple emails, meaning you’d have to stitch the data strings together to get to something a browser could load. It wasn’t as bad as having someone read HTML line-by-line to you down the phone, but it wasn’t much better either.

This experimental, gruelling subversion of my company’s IT policy didn’t last long. But not because I was caught – because it sucked so much. Even now, thinking back to how slow and frustrating it was makes me feel sleepy. I returned to wasting my time by drawing cartoons, with the web left waiting until I got home.

If you want to know more about this painstaking, archaic form of internet access, you should look at the website of www4mail, which might have been the service I used. It’s a very similar concept anyway.

When I read about Smozzy I instantly thought of those days, browsing the web via email, and felt a kind of admiration for people who work to secure web access at all costs. Projects like Smozzy and www4mail are ambitious conceptually and technically, and that can’t be denied, even if the user experience is horrible.

An even more ambitious project in this vein is IPoAC, or Internet Protocol over Avian Carriers – browsing the internet over carrier pigeon. Although it’s tongue-in-cheek, it was actually implemented by a group of Norwegian Linux users in 2001:

The group transmitted a “ping” command, among the most basic operations of the Internet, in which one computer sends a signal to another, which in turn signals that it is attached to the network…

The pigeon protocol didn’t mean the fastest of networks, though. Taking an hour and 42 minutes to transfer a 64-byte packet of information makes the pigeon network about 5 trillion times slower than today’s cutting-edge 40 gigabit-per-second optical fiber networks.

That doesn’t sound much worse than my experience of web over email. I can only assume that Smozzy, as a smartphone-era update of this concept, will be smoother, faster, and less likely to leave white poo splattered over the user.