Yahoo is closing its GeoCities personal homepage service, and with it will go an era of self-expression on the web that has largely been replaced by social networks and blogs.
GeoCities rose to power during an era when publishing on the internet meant setting up your own website. GeoCities simplified the process by helping people sidestep the complications of registering a domain and learning how to program HTML.
Yahoo bought GeoCities for more than $2.9bn in dot-com-priced stock in 1999, when GeoCities had more than 1.1 million users. However, while the idea of having a personal presence on the internet has caught on, GeoCities turned out to be a backwater, not the mainstream.
"We will be closing GeoCities later this year," Yahoo said in a note on the site. "We'll provide more details about closing GeoCities and how to save your site data this summer."
Goodbye Geocities, hello Facebook
Today, the way people choose to express themselves on the internet is shifting away from isolated web pages. Instead they use social-networking sites such as Facebook, with built-in features for creating a profile, staying in touch with contacts and maintaining at least a little privacy; WordPress, where it is easy to post updates to a blog; or Flickr, where the photographically inclined can meet, share and comment.
What these services and others including Twitter, YouTube, MySpace and Blogger possess is a mechanism to notify interested parties of new activity, helping to keep social links pulsing with new information in a way that cannot be replicated by depending on a person to visit a personal website.
That's not to say personal homepages are extinct. Google Sites still exists, and Yola, formerly SynthaSite, bought out search ads related to GeoCities searches on Thursday. But for most people, it is easier to rely on more sophisticated pre-built services than to create their own sites.
It is no surprise GeoCities is to be shut down. Yahoo has its hands full trying to integrate its successful properties with the socially active parts of the internet, and does not have resources to spare on last decade's trend.
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Part of GeoCities's closure is related to Yahoo's circumstances. The company was already under financial pressure before the recession arrived in full force, but now things are even tighter, and new chief executive Carol Bartz is focusing on the company's core, successful properties — and laying off about 675 employees in areas that do not pass muster.
GeoCities's vanishing sites?
One thing still unclear is what will become of GeoCities pages. New sign-ups are already no longer permitted, but what about existing sites?
According to Yahoo: "You can continue to enjoy your website 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 centre with more details at that time."
That leaves open the possibility that Yahoo will make it possible to move a site to another service, as it did when shutting down Yahoo Photos. Yahoo would not comment on its plans.
Another option is to upgrade to a separate paid Yahoo service: "You don't need to change your service today, but we encourage anyone interested in a full-featured web-hosting plan to consider upgrading to our award-winning Yahoo Web Hosting service."
But given how many GeoCities users were not technical experts, it seems likely that a lot of amateur websites soon will vanish without a trace, a casualty of business priorities and the internet's rapid changes.
