Yahoo Is Closing GeoCities Today
Time is up for GeoCities as Yahoo Inc. is scheduled to close what is probably the most significant virtual museum in the history of internet. The once central meeting place for American web surfers is going to take a bow and lock its doors completely.
GeoCities was a site that is arguably the pioneer of free web hosting services. It allowed users to create custom web pages for free and allocated a part of its virtual storage for documents and pictures. It can also be considered one of the first examples of personal and participatory Internet.
But at the turn of the century, GeoCities was this close to being ubiquitous as practically everything can be documented and accessible, thanks to search engines. And all these memories are due to disappear.
Earlier this year, GeoCities has already stopped accepting new users. The existing ones can still update their pages and save sites to their personal hard drives to prepare for the closure. Yahoo has also encouraged users to transfer their accounts to its $5-per-month web hosting solutions.
The decision to close GeoCities down completely is rather curious, says metrics tracker Alexa. The site is still getting significant traffic after all and one can just slap ads all over it to keep it afloat as historical reference.
According to a spokesperson for Yahoo, closing GeoCities was part of the company’s effort to prioritize their portfolio of products that are better aligned to their business goals and to their commitment towards delivering quality products and services to users.
Yahoo has been downsizing a lot over the past year. It has just closed services such as Yahoo 360 which is considered a direct competitor to GeoCities and My Web, a service much like Delicious. But closing GeoCities and letting it collapse is probably the worst in Yahoo’s portfolio.
