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RIP GeoCities: 1994-2009

by Terrence O'Brien on April 24, 2009 at 04:02 PM

RIP GeoCities 1994-2009

GeoCities (you know, that aging homepage hosting service that you only ever arrived at by accident) is getting ready to shut its doors. The pioneering service, which eventually sold out to Yahoo! and slowly slipped into complete irrelevance, became popular in the 90's during the early dot-com boom for allowing geeks to quickly and easily create their own basic Web sites.

Yahoo! very quietly announced the demise of the all-but-forgotten service via the GeoCities' help page. GeoCities has stopped signing up new customers (was there anyone actually still signing up for this service?) and, by the end of the year, will shut down entirely. At that point, users' pages will no longer be accessible online.

News of the closing has been greeted with a collective shrug, and a little ironic nostalgia, by the Interwebs. PC World summed it up pretty nicely with the headline: "So Long, GeoCities: We Forgot You Still Existed." For its part, BetaNews waxed nostalgic over GeoCities's less-than-professional appearance, accurately describing most of the pages on the service as "Eye-searing."



Despite the fact that Yahoo! hasn't announced plans to move GeoCities pages to a new free hosting service (or any service at all for that matter), many are quick to point out that there are plenty of options for people who want to create quick personal Web pages. If social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook aren't cutting it for you, there is Ning, which lets you create mini, custom social networks. Services like Google Sites and Wordpress also allow you to create basic Web pages that are infinitely more polished than anything that has ever reared its ugly head on GeoCities.

So are any of you out there still using GeoCities? Will it be missed? Do you even know what it is? Let us know in the comments. [From: Yahoo!, PC World, Beta News, RWW]

Tags: breaking news, BreakingNews, geocities, internet history, InternetHistory, nostalgia, recession, top, yahoo

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