Sunnyvale, California — Yahoo has been persistently pulling down many of its underperforming services and products for a while now and shows no signs of stopping anytime soon. The internet pioneer has released a “final notice” on Wednesday reminding GeoCities users that the free site creation service will be closing up shop later this month.
If you happen to be closely knitted to the Internet since its early days, then chances are high that you certainly might have discovered at least one whacky Geocities’ hosted website. Back in the proverbial day, GeoCities was the place where many a modern-day internet nerd cut his or her teeth. Few though have such a history and significance behind them as GeoCities, the free website hosting service that Yahoo acquired ten years ago for $3.65 billion and which will close down completely on October 26.
“Yahoo! GeoCities, our free web site building service and community, is closing on October 26, 2009,” Yahoo’s notice to existing customers reads.
“On October 26, 2009, your GeoCities site will no longer appear on the Web, and you will no longer be able to access your GeoCities account and files. If you would like to move your web site, or save the images and other files you have posted online, you need to act now.”
Yahoo wrote on its GeoCities Help page that its decision to shut down the site was deeply distilled in its desire to help its “customers explore and build relationships online in other ways.”
Yahoo is offering several options to existing GeoCities users. Those who wish to maintain the site can either port it to Yahoo’s Web Hosting service, which would cost $4.99 per month for a year and $9.95 per month afterward. GeoCities Plus customers, who already pay for the service, can move without any additional charges. Alternatively, Yahoo also suggests another options but urges the users to move quickly as after the 26th the files would not be available and will be deleted from the servers.
In fact, even before the term “blogging” was coined, Geocities was the place back in the 90’s to voice your opinion — that too, in your own maverick style, of course! Geocities pages was the MySpace of the 90’s with the a plethora of absolutely whacky user web sites complete with an overdose of primary colors and glittering text hosted on it.
Yahoo, of course, has been busy pulling down and cutting costs under CEO Carol Bartz. With the company diverting its focus elsewhere, it makes sense to shut down what is essentially an internet relic. Still, to those who look back with nostalgia, October 26 could well be a wistful day. Check out the full farewell letter below, and let us know if you have any memories from the heady GeoCities days to share in the comments!
Originally created by David Bohnett and John Rezner back in 1994. GeoCities’ closure marks an end of an era for the Web. The free site-building service, which Yahoo bought in 1999 for an astronomical $2.9 billion, was a precursor to many of the self-publishing and social-media tools Web users employ today.
Now moving speedily into 2009 almost 10 years after the buyout, Yahoo seems to have had enough and is finally shutting down Geocities. As someone who used GeoCities to create his first personal site, but now, one would feel a bit sad to say good-bye. That said, its about time.
