GeoCities is shut down
Yahoo has
pulled the plug on GeoCities, the free service that hosts personal home pages
for punters after ten years of operation.
The search engine outfit splashed
out more than $4 billion for GeoCities more than a decade ago. Those were in
the days of the dotcom boom when people were writing cheques for ideas that were
just plain silly.
According to a posting on a Yahoo Help page for GeoCities
the service was no longer accepting new customers and that it will be closing
later this year, with more details about how individuals can save their data
coming this summer.
Yahoo has been cutting its costs like a mad thing since
Chief Executive Carol Bartz took the reins in January. Several products products
have gone the way of the Dodo including Jumpcut, an online service for editing
videos.
GeoCities was the social notworking site of its day with more than
3.5 million websites hosted on its service in the late 1990s. However it was
dead end technology and has been largely replaced by the likes of Facebook and
MySpace.