Goodbye GeoCities!

Before Facebook, before Twitter, before Multiply, before MySpace, before Friendster, there was GEOCITIES.

I was going through my Yahoo e-mail account, which I barely check, and found an e-mail that says www.geocities.com is closing! I quickly went to the website and true enough Yahoo! Geocities is closing on October 26, 2009 – a little over a month.

To those who don’t remember, “Geocities was launched in 1994 as Beverly Hills Internet and began offering free home pages to its users in 1995. In December of that year, the name was changed to Geocities and by mid-1997 it had grown to become one of the most popular destinations on the Internet. Yahoo! purchased Geocities in January 1999 for over $3.5 billion.” (www.escapistmagazine.com)

I then remembered the websites I made with Geocities back in high school. Visiting some of them (the ones I actually remembered) brought back so many fun memories! In fact, it was through Geocities that I had one of my first web experiences. I remember that I initially made some of my earlier websites using NOTEPAD and later on realized that it would be easier to use Frontpage. Now, it’s going to get deleted in a little over a month.

But, why is Yahoo! Geocities closing?

According to Yahoo!, they have decided to focus on helping their customers “explore and build relationships online in other ways.” Yahoo! is recommending their award-winning Web Hosting service, which works a lot like Geocities but includes personalized domain name and matching email, web site building tools, unlimited disk space and bandwidth, customer support, and more.

It is closing down because this once-popular free hosting service fell victim to the new breed of online social networks such as Friendster, Facebook, Multiply, MySpace and Twitter. Before, people usually expressed themselves through setting up their own website. Nowadays, they use social-networking sites such as Friendster, Facebook, Twitter, etc. Gone is another era of self-expression through the Internet.

Although I understand why Geocities has to close down, its official end is still a bit nostalgic.

Goodbye Geocities. Thank you for the memories.