RIP Geo Cities

  Quote

Yahoo is to close its personal web hosting site GeoCities later this year.

 

In a statement, the firm says it will no longer be accepting new customers and will focus on helping "customers build new relationships online".

 

Yahoo bought GeoCities for $3.57bn at the height of the dotcom boom in 1999.

 

At its peak, GeoCities boasted millions of active accounts, but it has since fallen out of fashion, with users migrating to social networking sites.

 

Yahoo says that existing GeoCities accounts will remain live for now, although it stresses that users should start looking for alternative sites.

 

"You don't need to change your service today, but we encourage anyone interested in a full-featured web-hosting plan to consider upgrading to our award-winning Yahoo! Web Hosting service," the firm said in an online post.

 

The closure of GeoCities spells the end of Yahoo's free hosting, although other services - such as e-mail accounts - remain unaffected.

 

Rupert Goodwins, editor of the ZDNet website, said the closure of GeoCities was the end of an era.

 

"I think GeoCities was the first proof that you could have something really popular and still not make any money on the internet.

 

"It was a fascinating experiment in the pre-industrial era of the internet, but after the initial exuberance on what the web could do, it turned out to be more complicated than just giving them free hosting.

 

"You need to give users tools to actually do things and make things simple, one of the reasons sites like Facebook and MySpace are so popular," he said.

yeah, saw this on /. yesterday

seeing as i still find some mad weird interesting shit on geocities pages from time to time, you'd imagine they'd do a "freeze in stasis" thing rather than just killing it. i wonder what internet circa 1996's thoughts on this are.

Area51/Cavern/3210

I made my first Web site on Geocities. It had a lot of spelling errors and yellow text on a red background.

  analogue wings said:

the site i made my first website on is long dead but I have a feeling I made a geocities page once, no idea if it is still there

  Glass Plate said:

  analogue wings said:

 

 

 

 

IT'S LIKE MY 486DX2 COMPUTER WITH ONLY 32MB OF RAM IS ENDLESSLY THRASHING THE DISK FOR VIRTUAL MEMORY ALL OVER AGAIN

a great part of internets history will be lost if they decide to shut it all down.

Is anyone bothering to archive the MR T ATE MY BALLS page and all of the spinoff pages in what must have been one of the very first significant memes?

I've asked this recently before and got no answers, but this is the place: Does anyone remember that article from a couple of years or so ago which analysed the homepages of the mid/late 90's and compared them to the Myspace and Facebook pages of today? Would love to read that one again if anyone knows where to find it...

i thought this was going to be about those things that stick to women's nipples.

angelfire still exists!

Best use of comic sans font, end of an era.

...as if millions of dancing baby suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.