Just ran across this news article today and thought it may be interesting/sad to some people. Here's a short excerpt:

 

SAN FRANCISCO — Yahoo! on Monday closed GeoCities, a free Web hosting service that it purchased for over three billion dollars at the height of the dot-com boom.

 

"We have enjoyed hosting websites created by Yahoo! users all over the world, and we're proud of the community you've built," the California-based Internet pioneer said in a message at the GeoCities website.

 

"However, we have decided to focus on helping our customers explore and build relationships online in other ways."

 

Yahoo! said GeoCities would not be available after Monday and recommended GeoCities refugees set up new online homes at its paid Web hosting service, with an introductory offer of just five dollars for the first 12 months.

The operative word here being "customers". Yahoo wants money, not leechers.

 

- Zombie

That's how many thousands of people? Even at $5 that's a lot of money, if they actually bother with it. Lots of abandoned geocities out there.

Guess the revenue from the ads just wasn't coming in. Had my first web page on it, but when they took away FTP access, I gradually lost interest.

 

Not sure why, but the moment Yahoo! became part of the name, I got this idea that it was going to be a hostile takeover. The sort where large companies buy up smaller companies just to shut them down. This appears to have been quite a protracted one.

 

 

- NKF

They took away FTP access? I guess that was why I couldn't find it when I went to backup my site. I probably have it archived on my drive somewhere anyway.

 

xkcd did a "memorial", which was both very nostalgic for me while at the same time providing a reminder why I'd stopped visiting GeoCities sites long ago. It's discussed in their forum, which links off to a mirror.

 

I especially liked the camera ad (the X-10 cams used to account for a fair bit of internet ads/spam, or so says this history of the internet).