Yahoo Quietly Pulls The Plug On Geocities

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/04/23/yahoo-quietly-pulls-the-plug-on-geocities/

by vaksel • 17 years ago

51 34 17 years ago

techcrunch.com

kqr2• 17 years ago

I wonder if the internet archive could make a final complete archive before it closes.

charlesju• 17 years ago

It's not closing right? Just stopping new users from creating accounts.

Dmatig• 17 years ago

I think it's closing later this year

"Existing GeoCities accounts have not changed. 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."

http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/geocities/geocities-05.html

aditya• 17 years ago

GeoCities’ traffic has been falling over the past year. According to ComScore, GeoCities unique visitors in the U.S. fell 24 percent in March to 11.5 million unique visitors from 15.1 million in March of 2008. Back in October, 2006, it had 18.9 million uniques.

Funny how 11MM uniques is not enough for a Yahoo! product where as if a small startup was doing that much (and monetizing better than cp{c,a,m} ads) they would be making a killing...

timcederman• 17 years ago

Depends on per user cost.

tomjen• 17 years ago

For geocities? That can't possibly be that high.

chops3• 17 years ago

I'm glad that they're not immediately deleting existing sites. I have old geocities sites up that I never really backed up (from when I was a teen) and I have no idea what the username or passwords are.

Now's the time to wget --mirror them

gamache• 17 years ago

A few months back, I wanted to get some orphaned files from my ancient Geocities page. I remembered my username (now of the form username.geo) but the password wasn't coming to me. I tried to recover my password but none of the 20 email addresses I gave them was right. Eventually, after being on the phone with customer service and brainstorming every email address I have ever had, the password came back to me -- the original, four-letter dictionary word assigned as the default when I signed up in early 1995.

So, uh, just think about it too much for a few hours and it might come back to you.

chops3• 17 years ago

Conveniently, I don't have anything that's inaccessible from the main page, so a simple

  wget --mirror http://www.geocities.com/my/path

was enough to get everything I needed.

Stripping out the auto-added ads was easy enough to not be a big deal. But hey, if you can actually remember your passwords, more power to you. Maybe if I get bored, I'll try to figure it out and see if I had anything I had uploaded there for posterity, but I don't think so.

akkartik• 17 years ago

I wonder what'll happen to web 2.0 when web 3.0 or whatever rolls around. I fear all these permalinks aren't so permanent after all.

chops3• 17 years ago

On a long enough timescale, everything dies, including hyperlinks.

larryfreeman• 17 years ago

People can now transfer content to a blog site, Ning, or a place like HubPages.Com (the site where I work).

I think it's a real loss for Yahoo. Even if it doesn't bring in that much money, it is 11.5 unique visitors a month.

JeffL• 17 years ago

Do you guys think this is more a case of a shrinking niche or Yahoo being incompetent with its acquisition?

bigbang• 17 years ago

With social media exploding and others (like Google pages) providing ad fre(or less annoying ads), I would think this is shrinking and makes sense to shut down.

zandorg• 17 years ago

It's time to admit that the Web was never intended for long-term storage, with staunch personal sites the rarity, and fads, and news (up to 4 weeks old) is the trend. It's just a total failure, archive-wise.

Note: Why don't they just sell Geocities to someone who'll keep it going?

citizenparker• 17 years ago

If you sell Geocities, then you can't convert them to paying customers of Yahoo web hosting. You can't convert them to Yahoo anything at that point.

If you publicly mothball GC though, then you can maybe get a fraction (5-10% at most I'd guess) to become paying users at SOME level.

Even at that meager conversion rate, I see that being a better call then selling the remnants of GC off.

marcusbooster• 17 years ago

I'm always conflicted on these things. For privacy's sake, I don't want every little thing I posted on my angelfire page many years ago to be a part of the world's permanent record on me. But I can't help but feel we are losing a lot of valuable information about ourselves when these things go.

I dunno, maybe if we had a way to keep it around but under a lock and key. Then we could release our incessant teenage babbling's when we think they are "cute" rather than "just crazy enough" to draw the ire of some h.r. sheriff.

Derferman• 17 years ago

As previously mentioned in the thread, a wget --mirror http://www.geocities.com/my/path will save your site.

kulkarnic• 17 years ago

What a reminder how the Web keeps changing. I remember when I thought Geocities was kinda cool. Can't really remember too many sites like that-- which remained essentially unchanged, yet had such a userbase for so long. In fact, I can't think of one other.

anigbrowl3• 17 years ago

And so, AngelFire had finally triumphed...

Is it me, or do all portal-type services seem to go through the same curve, since CompuServe to Facebook? Unified interface and handy tools excite early adopters, interest scales in sigmoid fashion, plateaus, and diminishing returns set in as the signal-to-noise ratio declines, followed by profitability.

It seems to happen over and over again, like waves on the seashore. Many people clearly want a 'home' on the net with a structured community...much the same way people like suburban tract housing with homeowner's associations. Every few years someone makes fat money by finding a new way to cater to these people, few of whom want to maintain their own domain or pages. Numerous me-too sites grab a small slice of this (like facespace.com...really). 5 years later, it's like that nightclub down the street that used to be so cool.

mahmud2• 17 years ago

Please pursue that thought to a full blown article. You might be onto something here:

"Many people clearly want a 'home' on the net with a structured community..."

anigbrowl3• 17 years ago

This is all ^his fault. http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dd93s8qb_37dqrnxjdk

blogimus• 17 years ago

What you describe sounds like the restaurant (hospitality) life cycle.

It's like any entertainment, if it gets stale, people move on. I also think of all those post WW2 neighborhood restaurants and bars that slowly sunk into oblivion.

Here's just one opinion piece on the restaurant topic that lists the following:

  Stage 1: Grand Opening & Awesome Service
  Stage 2: Building Towards Peak Crowds
  Stage 3: Staff and/or Owner Turnover
  Stage 4: Sinking Towards Shit Ass Service
  Stage 5: Disaster!!!

http://disenchanted.wordpress.com/2008/05/28/the-life-cycle-...

dinkumthinkum• 17 years ago

Yeah, but you have to admit Geocities survived a long time; it's been around eons in Web time.

sketerpot• 17 years ago

But for how much of that time was it seen as a slum?

ReTelTech• 17 years ago

Wow...I've had a GeoCities site since 1997. I think the last time I updated it was in...2002?

calvin• 17 years ago

GeoCities was my first site. Being given a chance to play with HTML (4.0 was still cutting edge) is what drew me into the tech world and led to the career I now have. I'm sad to see it go, but it's function has been replaced by numerous other sites and Yahoo! doesn't have any reason to keep it going/growing.

intellectronica• 17 years ago

ah, it's the end of an era ... i'll miss it.

ensignavenger• 17 years ago

Hmm, I always preferred Angelfire. My first websites were on Angelfire, years ago.

j_baker• 17 years ago

I'm surprised to find out that geocities still exists.

landist• 17 years ago

Good time for Weebly to issue a statement (press release, etc.) calling for all Geocities customers. It's a "Statue of Liberty" moment - "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe a free website" - Be Bold Weebly... call Yahoo out and get some free press.

Yahoo Quietly Pulls The Plug On Geocities

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