Goodbye Geocities
A slightly quieter story which has been doing the rounds this week is the news that Yahoo has disabled new registrations for GeoCities accounts and announced that the service will be shut down later this year.
I personally have fond memories of GeoCities, when I first started on the Web most of the sites I visited regularly had a geocities.com address—though this was before the company was acquired by Yahoo. GeoCities was one of the first places where you could get free hosting without too much hassle, and it certainly stayed around longer than most. Most of all I will remember the small ‘g’ logo which followed you as you scrolled down the screen, and the dozens of forum posts across the Web asking how to achieve the same effect on other sites.
I suspect Yahoo’s reason for killing off Geocities is simple: the service costs money to run and doesn’t bring in much revenue—I’d be very surprised if it breaks even. Yahoo desperately needs to cut costs and turn back into a profitable company, and Geocities is a service which can quickly and easily be jettisoned to help achieve this goal. Yahoo would of course like you to upgrade to their paid web hosting service, but at $9.95/month you can find a much better deal elsewhere.
Of course, if Yahoo had any sense they would have let Microsoft buy them when a good offer was on the table, instead of trundling along as an independent company trying to cut costs in a desperate attempt to please aggrieved shareholders, who have seen the value of their holdings plummet.
Further Information
- GeoCities will close later this year (Yahoo Help)
- RIP Geocities – Yahoo kills off ‘your home on the web’ (Guardian Unlimited)
- Yahoo pulls the plug on GeoCities (BBC News)
- GeoCities demolished (The Register)