Yahoo Going to Close Geocities This Year

[postman]

AOL took down its Journals and Hometown services, and now
Yahoo's following suit with its own GeoCities, the hosting service
that once upon a dot-com bubble seemed to include half the
personal sites on the Web.

Yahoo isn't currently providing a lot of detail about what users can
expect from the shutdown process, other than that it'll happen "later
this year," probably in the summer timeframe. As that unknown
date nears, says GeoCities Help Page, "We'll provide more details
about closing GeoCities and how to save your site data this summer,
and we will update the help center with more details at that time."

Long before MySpace, GeoCities was responsible for a great number
of sites put up by ordinary folk, often operating with more enthusiasm
than design sense. ("Eye-searing" is a word that comes to mind.)
The firm was one of the big buys of 1999, as Yahoo picked up the
company, which was founded in 1994 as "Beverly Hills Internet,"
later "Geopages," for $2.87 billion. (Which even at the time we
thought was a lot to have one's eyeballs seared.)

The "Cities" part of the name came from the early conceit of choosing
a city appropriate for one's pages -- "Hollywood" for a fan site,
for instance. Over the years the site hosted tens of millions of
pages, though traffic has dropped in recent years as users switched
to even simpler (and less eye-searing) blogging sites.