R.I.P.: GeoCities

GeoCities. Chances are, if you’ve been on the Internet since the mid-to-late 1990’s, you have something to say about GeoCities. You might hate the service, as it resulted in thousands of useless websites, or you might have nothing but praise, since it was an outlet that allowed you to express your creativity in the form of a webpage. Regardless of your thoughts, GeoCities used to be a major part of the Internet, and there were few people who hadn’t heard of it.

GeoCities, which began out as “Beverly Hills Internet” (to think, this was at a time when there wasn’t a shortage of good names!), became a household name fast with those who had access to the Internet. There were few services that allowed regular Joe’s to create their own website for free, but GeoCities did, and they were one of the best (Tripod and Angelfire were also popular). So much so, that companies like Yahoo! invested in the company, and ended up purchasing them out-right in late 1999 for $3.57 billion in stock. Today, an acquisition like this isn’t even thought much of, but back then, that kind of transaction was major.

After that point, Yahoo! slowly shifted GeoCities away from the limelight, and eventually started focusing on its own venture called Yahoo! Web Hosting, a paid service that offered more robust service and webspace allowances, in addition to a personal web address (not something.geocities.com). Eventually, GeoCities  was becoming more of a burden than anything, and it was with that, that a few months ago, Yahoo! decided to pull the plug, with the final date for the site being today.

If you still had a site hosted with GeoCities, hopefully you already got all you needed from the site, as Yahoo! seems rather relentless in purging all of the data as soon as possible. The Internet Archive has been pushing its servers hard over the past few months to download as many GeoCities websites as possible, so if you happened to have lost yours, you can check there and see if it’s been backed up.

R.I.P. GeoCities, and thank you for some of my earliest moments of the web.

However, we have decided to focus on helping our customers explore and build relationships online in other ways. Beginning on October 26, 2009, you will no longer be able to use GeoCities to maintain a free presence online – but we’re excited about the other services we have designed to help you connect with friends and family and share your activities and interests.