Yahoo’s $3.65 Billion Mistake: Yahoo Closes GeoCities

http://crenk.com/yahoos-3-65-billion-mistake-yahoo-closes-geocities/

by insomniamedia • 17 years ago

32 31 17 years ago

armadilko• 17 years ago

Yep they have to consolidate their business there is a lot of waste there.

andr• 17 years ago

"To quickly download your published files, visit your GeoCities web site, right-click on each page, and choose Save Page As... from the menu that appears."

Ouch! They could at least provide an export tool.

dragonquest• 17 years ago

True, however wget seems like a good option. Try

http://www.nowindows.net/wp/?p=94

zandorg• 17 years ago

It 503's if too many pages are requested at once...

However, you can submit a link to the Internet Archive and they'll spider that Geocities site. I asked the IA to save all that data. I don't know if it was because of my suggestion, and it's still not a direct copy of the whole of Geocities, but it's a good thing. (Note: Yahoo links to the IA 'add url' thing, and it's really prominent in the Geocities help pages, so I think they've done a good job).

http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/geocities/close/close-17.ht...

GiraffeNecktie• 17 years ago

So was GeoCities the FaceBook of 1999?

TheBranca182• 17 years ago

No. Not even close.

tibbon3• 17 years ago

No?

While scale wise it obviously wasn't, in the mid to late 90's it was the place that most people had their first websites and communities grow. People act like 'the wall' on FB is something new. Hello? Guestbooks.

boredguy8• 17 years ago

Perhaps a better analogy is MySpace, on account of the "copy/paste" approach people with little technical skill used to do things like add templates.

brk2• 17 years ago

I've said several times that Facebook is the GeoCities of Web2.0 (and I ultimately think it will suffer the same fate).

When GeoCities was in its prime it was pretty significant. Between some of the core features of GeoCities and add-ons like guestbooks, webrings, ICQ badges, etc., there was a good degree of "social networking", for the state of things at the time.

dotcoma• 17 years ago

well, GeoCities sure brought them a ton of users, and even if they were expensive compared to how Google or Facebook got their users, it was different back then, and buying a successful company may have been less expensive (and successful, at least) in the end than doing a lot of pointless tv commercials.

BTW, getting rid of Yahoo! Games, Yahoo! Shopping, Zimbra (given how poor the current Yahoo! Mail is) and del.icio.us does not seem very wise to me...

meterplech• 17 years ago

they are focusing on their core-competencies. yahoo can't be the best at everything, so they are going to sell the things that are distracting them from the goods

padmapper• 17 years ago

But as far as I can tell, the main thing they're good at is being a one-stop shop...

tibbon3• 17 years ago

Textfiles has been working hard to make an archive of Geocities. I need to call Jason and see how that went.

Mark_B• 17 years ago

I wonder if anybody did something similar for Compuserve's version (ourworld.cs.com) before it closed up in July.

theklub• 17 years ago

I hope all of that information was saved somewhere. Although I'm sure most of it turned into wikipedia pages.

clutchski• 17 years ago

let its gifs spin forever in our minds.

pavel_lishin• 17 years ago

"Under destruction"

maukdaddy• 17 years ago

Does this mean I need to adjust my webring? ;)

brown9-2• 17 years ago

Just because Yahoo spent $3.65 billion on this acquisition 10 years ago, and now they are shutting down the service, does not mean that the $3.65 billion was wasted.

The article makes no mention of technology, users, services, etc, that may have been integrated into Yahoo from Geocities - which certainly would not be a waste.

Just because they are now terminating the original service does not mean that the acquisition was a waste.

pg• 17 years ago

They got one of the most important things they wanted from Geocities, which was to remain the #1 (= most unique visitors) web site. That counted for a lot back then. Competitors like Lycos were pulling all kinds of tricks to jack up visitor numbers, like getting the NFL to put the Super Bowl web site at superbowl.lycos.com. One could argue that Yahoo overpaid to remain #1, but it was worth something.

That was practically the only thing Yahoo got from Geocities though.

jimmyrcom2• 17 years ago

Yahoo isn't dead yet? Don't forget their podcast.com Mark Cuban bs and saying $37 a share was too low for a microsoft aquisition.

jimmyrcom2• 17 years ago

and this recently http://government.zdnet.com/?p=5547

skinnymuch2• 17 years ago

Their stock is pretty solid still.

raganwald• 17 years ago

Cynical thought:

Is it really important to shutter these services to "focus on their core competencies" or is it really important to give Wall Street the appearance of doing something, anything?

IOW, is Geocities really consuming management attention? is it losing buckets of money? Is it diluting Yahoo! brand?

Or is this just a way of showing the world that management is "getting serious" and "making changes?"

fizx• 17 years ago

> IOW, is Geocities really consuming management attention? is it losing buckets of money? Is it diluting Yahoo! brand?

Maybe it just has some good engineers tied up?

skinnymuch2• 17 years ago

This is exactly what I've been wondering, with all the stuff Yahoo is shutting down.

mleonhard• 17 years ago

My first webpage was on GeoCities. I learned HTML and made my own bullet graphics. I scanned a tablecloth and made a tiling background with Paint Shop Pro. This was all on Windows 3.1 and IE2, if I remember correctly.

Those were the days. :)

brk2• 17 years ago

Wow, Windows 3.1. The TCP/IP stack on that was horrible, surprised to managed to get online ;)

Yahoo’s $3.65 Billion Mistake: Yahoo Closes GeoCities

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