Yahoo putting Geocities out of its misery
Geocities was one of the first sites to offer you a simple Web page and the tools to edit the text and images to your heart’s content. Now it’s time to put this old dog out of its misery, much the same fate as Google Page Creator and AOL Hometown.
As of this week, Geocities is no longer accepting new accounts. The service will shutter at some point this year, so users would be wise to download their information in the near future.
Yahoo purchased Geocities back in 1999, when very few people had the knowledge to create a Web site. The community flourished, creating millions of sites about their children, Chihuahuas and, for some, small businesses.
At the time, Geocities was hip, easy to use and helped a lot of people set up their very space online. It would be a few more years before MySpace came along, adding searchable personal information to personal Web spaces to help people network.
Somewhere along the way from Geocities to Facebook, people lost the drive to be their own Webmaster as social networks made it easier to customize a page. That’s what enabled people to share their lives and find their friends at the same time.
As for the small business on Geocities, many have migrated to their own domains. Otherwise they can simply list their information in Google Local results so that people can search for their services.
As the tools have matured for people to set up their own Web sites, blogs and photo galleries on social networks and the Web at large, services like Geocities have been neglected. Thumbing through Geocities is not unlike taking a trip back in time to reminisce about the Wild West days of the Internet.
A moment of silence is in order for the venerable old dog of Web page builders. Although there is a chance that users will petition Yahoo on their Facebook and blogs to keep Geocities limping along.
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April 24th, 2009
What a blast from the past. I didn’t even know it still existed. The world moves on I guess.
February 22nd, 2010
Not really. Coca Cola cannot replace water! geocities occupied a pioneering spot in the bigbang beginning time of Internet. That place will never be taken by anything new. Even today Google is hitting the old pages… even though Google search has removed all links to the geocties.com pages. But the references are there in many documents..which google cannot remove! Even google is now suprised (so should Yahoo too) that many gecoties pages continue to live under reocities, geocities.ws and oocities. Yahoo has failed in its attempt .. Instead Yahoo looks like an idiot spitting upward after lying flat!