April 23, 2009 1:37 PM PDT
Now closing: GeoCities, a relic of Web's early days
by
Stephen Shanklandwebware155:http%3A%2F%2Fnews.cnet.com%2F8301-17939_109-10226255-2.html
Yahoo! BuzzYahoo is closing its GeoCities personal home page service, and with it will go an era of self-expression on the Web that's largely been replaced by social networks and blogs.
GeoCities rose to power during an era when publishing on the Internet meant setting up your own Web site. GeoCities simplified the process by helping people sidestep the complications of registering a domain and learning how to program HTML, the language that describes Web pages.
Yahoo is closing it GeoCities site this year.
Yahoo bought GeoCities for more than $2.9 billion in dot-com-priced stock in 1999, when GeoCities had more than 1.1 million users. However, while the idea of having a personal presence on the Internet has caught on, GeoCities turned out to be a backwater, not the mainstream.
"We will be closing GeoCities later this year.
" Goodbye Geocities, hello FacebookToday, the way people choose to express themselves on the Internet is shifting away from isolated Web pages. Instead they use social-networking sites such as Facebook, with built-in features for creating a profile, staying in touch with contacts, and maintaining at least a little privacy; WordPress, where it's easy to post updates to a blog; or Flickr, where the photographically inclined can meet, share, and comment.
What these services and others including Twitter, YouTube, MySpace, and Blogger possess is a mechanism to notify interested parties of new activity, helping to keep social links pulsing with new information in a way that just can't be replicated by depending on a person to swing by a personal Web site.
GeoCities' vanishing sites?Still unclear is what exactly will become of GeoCities pages. New sign-ups are already no longer permitted, but what about existing sites?
Here's how Yahoo put it: "You can continue to enjoy your Web site and GeoCities services until later this year. You don't need to change a thing right now--we just wanted you to let you know about the closure as soon as possible. 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."
That leaves open the possibility that Yahoo will make it possible to move a site to another service, as it did when shutting down Yahoo Photos, but in the current climate, it's probably best not to expect such a graceful transition option. Yahoo wouldn't comment on its plans.
Another option is to upgrade to a separate paid Yahoo service: "You don't need to change your service today, but we encourage anyone interested in a full-featured Web hosting plan to consider upgrading to our award-winning
Yahoo Web Hosting service."
But given how many GeoCities users weren't technical experts, it seems likely that a lot of amateur Web sites soon will vanish without a trace, a casualty of business priorities and the Internet's rapid changes.
Stephen Shankland covers Google, Yahoo, search, online advertising, portals, digital photography, and related subjects. He joined CNET News in 1998 and since then also has covered servers, supercomputing, open-source software, and science.
E-mail Stephen, or follow him on Twitter at
http://www.twitter.com/stshank.
