Yesterday, Yahoo announced that it is killing GeoCities, a free personal home page service.
Yahoo GeoCities is Dead
The history of Yahoo-GeoCities looks like this:
- Yahoo acquired GeoCities in 1999 for $4.6 billion in stock
- GeoCities was considered to be a cool platform for creating personal web personas
- GeoCities had 3.5 million personal sites
- Yahoo paid more than $100 per GeoCities profile. Wow!
After buying GeoCities, Yahoo failed to make significant upgrades to the site — and the personal web authoring game was quickly overtaken by MySpace, blogs, and other tools, all of which offered enhanced conversational capabilities.
Today, the web authoring game has transitioned to a whole new level of conversation.
The game is about interactions between SMBs and consumers and the bidirectional process of discovery. In other words, how do consumers find things? And, how do small business owners get found?
It’s also about the types of tools that are available once I find something or someone interesting. Can I click to call? Get I get directions or coupons sent to my phone via SMS? Can I subscribe to it? Can I offer rating and reviews? Can I Tweet about it? Share it on Facebook with my friends? Can I buy something?
In summary, the future of the web is about consumers and businesses being conversational and social with each other.
Carol Bartz is trying to position Yahoo for the future — and it’s why Yahoo killed GeoCities.
Its really too bad about them closing down geocities instead of trying to upgrade it since they do have a lot of people that have accounts.
I remember when I started ym first account. It was how I learned HTML.
Unfortunately, I went to different free platform since after a while of knowing more about HTML coding, I learned that it was very limited in what I could do.
Thanks for the article and the news.