27 April,2009 09:46 AM IST | | Balaji Narasimhan
While this free hosting site didn't change the world, it gave people their personal space on the Web over 15 years ago
It is always sad to see an old friend go, even if the said old friend hasn't moved mountains. This is the feeling that GeoCities, a part of Yahoo, invokes.
There was a time when it was extremely popular, but this was before people started using words like Facebook and Twitter. At that time, if you wanted to setup a free website, then you went to GeoCities. But the growth of the Web meant that people were more interested in using social networking and didn't care so much about setting up their own sites.
Early days
The site was originally started by David Bohnett and John Rezner in late 1994. It was originally called Beverly Hills Internet. Yahoo bought GeoCities in 1999 for over $2.9 billion in dot-com-priced stock. At that time, GeoCities was immensely popular and had over a million users.
When Yahoo bought GeoCities, it made some changes to the terms and conditions and since these conditions said that the company owned all rights and content, including media such as pictures, many users protested and started leaving the service. Yahoo grew nervous and reversed these conditions.
Tail spin
While GeoCities is not very popular these days, it doesn't mean that it is completely useless. We used compete.com to check out how many visitors GeoCities has had in recent days, we found that this stood at upward of 13 million for March 2009, so it still has its share of visitors.
But Yahoo has decided to pull the plug and has already stopped new sign-ups.
As Yahoo says on its GeoCities page, 'Existing GeoCities accounts have not changed. You can continue to enjoy your web site and GeoCities services until later this year.' But it is only a matter of time before GeoCities is nothing more than a part of the jetsam of the Web.
QUICK TAKE
>>Yahoo is shutting down GeoCities
>>The site was very popular around a decade ago
>>Users should look at other options
Where next?
If you have a GeoCities site, then you may have to move on. While paid hosting is one option, there are also other options for free hosting like:
>>https://www.angelfire.com/u00a0
>>https://www.sites.google.com/u00a0
>>https://www.tripod.com/u00a0
>>https://www.webs.com/
