Yahoo! is closing up GeoCities
If you learned how to make websites in the 1990s, there’s a very good chance that you started out on a GeoCities website, or at least owned one at some point. The service started providing free websites to just about anyone back in 1995.
It looks like GeoCities is on the way out. Yahoo! posted a notice on the site’s homepage that it will no longer allow new signups for the service, and will be closing it down entirely later this year. They promise to explain why this summer.
Back in 1999, when the Internet was nice and bubbly, Yahoo! bought Geocities for $3.57 billion dollars. I don’t think it went well. They’re probably getting more press now than they’ve had since the acquisition
GeoCities started going downhill for users before Yahoo! entered the scene, when they started pushing more ads and floating watermarks onto the sites. When Yahoo! bought them, they got worse. I’m not sure what even happened to my sites back then, but by that point I was moving on to better hosting, and would soon be buying my own domains.
Still, I can’t help but to feel a little saddened as we say goodbye to GeoCities. I first learned how to make websites there, and although I’d probably laugh if I ever saw them again (and I fear I may have used the <blink> and <marquee> elements at some point), it’s hard not to be at least little nostalgic.
