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Yahoo! said Thursday it will close its GeoCities service that provides people a free online locale for home pages.
The announcement comes two days after the struggling Internet pioneer posted lackluster earnings and its newly enthroned chief executive assured investors that the company is focusing its resources on core strengths.
"We will be closing GeoCities later this year," Yahoo! said. "As part of Yahoo!'s ongoing effort to build products and services that deliver the best possible experiences for consumers and results for advertisers, we are increasing investment in some areas while scaling back in others."
GeoCities is a web hosting service founded in 1994 as Beverly Hills Internet and bought by Yahoo! for more than three billion dollars during the height of the infamous dot-com boom in Silicon Valley.
GeoCities provided people with tools to build interactive websites and eventually added chat forums and other community-oriented features. A notice at GeoCities on Thursday said it is no longer accepting new accounts.
Yahoo! added fee premium services in an effort to make money at GeoCities, which had trouble retaining users and getting profitable.
GeoCities joins a list of recently discontinued Yahoo! services including Farechase, My Web, Audio Search, Pets, Live, Kickstart, Briefcase and Yahoo! for Teachers, according to the Sunnyvale, California-based firm.
© Wire reports
11 Comments
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gaijintraveller
What is the effect of this in Japan? Many people here use YahooBB as their ISP. Most ISPs provide free webspace. YahooBB's free webspace is on Geocities. It is no more than a Geocities premium account that accepts ftp transfers.
So what is going to happen to YahooBB customers who have spent hours building a website and uploading it to Geocities?
soldave
They'll probably be asked to move provider or, more than likely, Yahoo will start a similar system under a different name and somehow allow people to migrate over.
sk4ek
I just hope they don't terminate Yahoo Small Business.
nath
They emptied my brief case and I stored a lot of stuff there, but I copied it all
benhur
time to go msn or gooooogle!
Dennis Bauer
i hope they keep Yahoo mail
Elbuda Mexicano
RIP GeoCities!
sharky1
Yahoo! This will shut down a lot of rip offs on the internet!
saborichan
Geocities is usually populated by awful websites with too much yellow text and flashing rainbow text. I just hope some comedy gold like realultimatepower.net isn't hosted there.
greentea3
it's about time they closed it
SiouxGirl
I didn't know you had visited my website, saborichan. You must've been my one visitor ...