Yahoo Winds Down GeoCities. (Waitaminnit, GeoCities Still Exists?)

By  |  Thursday, April 23, 2009 at 1:48 pm

GeoCities LogoBack in the mid-to-late 1990s, build-your-own-Website services like GeoCities were the easiest way for folks without much technical expertise to get content onto the Web. So it wasn’t an utter act of insanity when Yahoo spent $3.57 billion to acquire GeoCities in 1999. Well, okay, the $3.57 billion part was irrational, but the world needed GeoCities.

By the turn of the millennium, though, GeoCities and its rivals started to be overshadowed by blogging–and today, it’s blogging services such as WordPress, Blogger, TypePad, and others that serve the purpose that GeoCities once did. I hadn’t given GeoCities much thought in years–until today, when I read on TechCrunch that Yahoo has stopped signing up new GeoCities members and will close the service altogether at some unspecified date later this year. Let’s hope that Yahoo does a better job of helping GeoCities users migrate to other options than AOL did when it shuttered its similar, similarly venerable AOL Hometown service last year–it gave users only a month’s warning, then purged their data and redirected their URLs to a terse blog post saying that Hometown was no more.

Yahoo’s GeoCities FAQ on the closure says that the service is going away “as we focus on helping our customers explore and build new relationships online in other ways.” Which is a vague way of saying “GeoCities is no longer a priority for us.” Presumably it’s part of Yahoo’s ongoing housecleaning, elimination of redundant services (it also offers Yahoo Web Hosting), and focus on core offerings with a high potential for profit.

There’s probably some alternate universe where GeoCities changed with the times and stayed popular, but it felt a tad dinosaurish even back when Yahoo bought it, thanks to a weird “homesteading” system that forced users to choose a neighborhood and street for their site, and annoyances such as a GeoCities logo that stayed on the screen even when you scrolled down on the page. On the other hand, a bunch of its 1990s competitors have managed to stick around–Homestead (now owned by Intuit and focused on small businesses), Tripod, and FortuneCity. Wonder if any of them will make a concerted effort to welcome the GeoCities residents who Yahoo is evicting?

 
19 Comments


Read more: , ,

14 Comments For This Post

  1. Ed Oswald Says:
    April 23rd, 2009 at 2:01 pm

    I’m kind of sad. My first real homepage was on geocities. Anyone remember those godawful long URLS? 😛

  2. Dave Mackey Says:
    April 23rd, 2009 at 2:21 pm

    And all the geeky “neighborhood” names!

  3. Jared Newman Says:
    April 23rd, 2009 at 2:42 pm

    Mine too, Ed. I can’t even remember my city and street name now. *sniff*

  4. Cindy Osborne Says:
    April 23rd, 2009 at 6:12 pm

    Well crap! I’ve got images stored under several yahoo screen names and linked to a number of blogs and websites…
    This is going to be a fun needle in a haystack search..

  5. Matthias Says:
    April 23rd, 2009 at 8:46 pm

    My first sites were all on geocities. I actually still have one up – it comforts me to know that it’s still out there. Time travel with me back to 2001: http://www.geocities.com/calm7boardwear

  6. Marc Says:
    April 24th, 2009 at 11:17 am

    I guess it demonstrates how the internet has changed so much within the last decade. Back in 1998, the majority of those using the web had an interest in technology – they were early adopters. Seeing a web page from Microsoft, or CNN, and being able to have your own page up there on an even footing was a revelation. It was considered part and parcel that you would learn something about how the web worked, a bit of HTML here, the odd FTP upload and guestbook CGI script there.

    Then in around 2002/2003, everyone else seemed to get online. After the hype of the dot com boom, the web was no longer a place just for early adapters. Blogs, (basically automated web sites) popped up. The content began to be shaped by the limitations of the web site’s automated script. “It puts a date by everything I enter… oh it must be an online diary, I’d better write what I’ve been doing today”
    And it’s these recent adopters who now have the obsession with Twitter and FaceBook. They haven’t yet seen it all before, they don’t know what IRC, Usenet or BBS are. For all its bad points (textured backgrounds, tags and embedded MIDIs), at least Geocities educated their users about the web along the way. While the likes of MySpace and WordPress have made putting content online more accessible, they’ve also “dumbed-down” the process, which was inevitable I guess.

    So while I won’t miss Geocities, I will miss some of the web sites it hosts. There are numerous long-abandoned fan sites for The X-Files I’ll read once in a while to see someone’s opinion on an episode after watching an episode on DVD. It would be a shame for them to just disappear.
    I built my first web site with Geocities! I now work as a web programmer. How many FaceBook profiles do you think will sow the seeds of a career?

  7. Matt Says:
    April 24th, 2009 at 7:28 pm

    And there was much rejoicing!

  8. Fazli S Says:
    May 1st, 2009 at 8:54 pm

    ohh.. sad to here this…
    my first site host here 🙁

  9. Sam Says:
    September 15th, 2010 at 1:59 pm

    I thought they were dead wayyyy before that

  10. Direct Says:
    September 15th, 2010 at 2:00 pm

    Geo-who?

  11. That Free TV Site Says:
    September 28th, 2010 at 10:55 pm

    Geo sites lol…That was a while ago….doesnt seem like it but yup

  12. Today's Top Products Says:
    September 29th, 2010 at 3:43 am

    Hey, this is a really great article…. Good work.

  13. Dr.Brad Campbell Says:
    October 7th, 2010 at 11:54 pm

    http://www.topfatlosstrainer.com/2009/09/29/megan…

    this is a very great blog that the readers having an interest to visit it often
    more on interesting things to follow and can give the satisfactions to the people.
    thank you guise for this article.

    Brad Campbell
    Megan Fox workout

  14. dog house plans Says:
    October 8th, 2010 at 12:11 am

    http://www.efreeshedplans.com/dog-house-plans/dog…
    this is a very nice blog very much interesting especially to all wide readers please come and visit blog often.

    dog house plans

5 Trackbacks For This Post

  1. What I Read Today: 2009-04-24 « My Mind Says:
    April 23rd, 2009 at 8:41 pm

    […] Yahoo Winds Down GeoCities. (Waitaminnit, GeoCities Still Exists?) – Technologizer (Another unsuccessful merger in internet industry…) […]

  2. 当年热门网站今安在—10年前流量最大的15个网站的现状 | 互联网的那点事... Says:
    May 4th, 2009 at 3:09 am

    […] 今天，在我静静地哀悼（至少是注意到）GeoCities的行将就木时，我想核实一下我的记忆，看看它是不是曾经是互联网上的超级大站。没错——十年前，1999年4月，网络调查公司MediaMatrix把它评为第六大在线财产。这又让我想起：1999年的网站巨人们到今天有几个还是庞然大物——假设它们还存在？ […]

  3. 10年前流量最大的15个网站的现状 « Lizus - PSD to xHTML & css,wordpress主题,图像设计 Says:
    May 5th, 2009 at 2:24 am

    […] 今天，在我静静地哀悼（至少是注意到）GeoCities的行将就木时，我想核实一下我的记忆，看看它是不是曾经是互联网上的超级大站。没错——十年前，1999年4月，网络调查公司Media Matrix把它评为第六大在线财产。这又让我想起：1999年的网站巨人们到今天有几个还是庞然大物——假设它们还存在？ […]

  4. Curtain Call for GeoCities | Technologizer Says:
    October 26th, 2009 at 9:54 am

    […] announced its plans to do away with the service back in April of this year. The company said at the time that “we have decided to focus on […]

  5. Yahoo’s GeoCities Takes Its Final Bow Today Says:
    October 26th, 2009 at 3:01 pm

    […] announced its plans to do away with the serviceback in April of this year. The company said at the time that “we have decided to focus on helping […]