Yahoo To Close GeoCities in 2009

Yahoo announced it will close its web hosting service called GeoCities later in 2009.  GeoCities brings back many memories for me.  Pounding the WebTV wireless keyboard into the wee hours of the morning building my two-column web pages complete with midi files and flying text.  This service began in 1994 when David Bohnett and John Rezner created ‘Beverly Hills Internet’.  The idea was you would build a website within a non-fictional city ‘network’ like Los Angeles or New York.  The idea was later scrapped though some sites still exist with that architecture.  Yahoo bought GeoCities for more than 3 billion dollars in 1999 shortly after the company wen’t public on the stock market.  During its peak in the late 90′s, Geocities was the 5th most trafficked site on the world wide web.  That is comparable to Facebook, YouTube and Wikipedia today.

GeoCities let anyone have a presence on the web free of charge and voice their opinions, much like Blogspot and WordPress do today.  Many non-profit organizations and personal individuals used GeoCities as their host because of the ease of use and cost.  Remember, this was back when everyone thought it was cool to have a ‘website’ with pictures of their dog and what they enjoy for hobbies.  GeoCities served their constituents very well for more than a decade.

R.I.P.  GeoCities —  2009 — This one is for you… ABBA – Dancing Queen

What really makes me feel old?  The trending topic on Twitter is ‘What Was GeoCities’.