An Ode to Geocities – Curtains Close on an Era of Web Publishing

After careful consideration, Yahoo! has decided to close GeoCities later this year. You can continue enjoying your GeoCities service until then — we just wanted you to let you know about the closure as soon as possible. We’ll share more details this summer.

So says the Geocities page on Yahoo! and in so many words it has brought the curtains down on an era in the life of the web. It has been 7 years since I first built a website, and like many others in those times it was on Geocities. It was the time when Yahoo was ‘The Yahoo’ and Google still a search engine and geocities was pioneering the concept of ad based free web hosting. Geocities amongst many others was the face of the portal era and in its own way a social network much before social networks as an idea was born.

Once a stand alone listed company, Geocities was bought by Yahoo in 1999 for $3 billion. And now with dropping revenues and a new head talking and deciding it has decided to shut the service down as part of its cost cutting efforts. The home page now is clearly an invitation to upgrade to paid hosting service provided by Yahoo. Like they say in the help page -

Can I prepare for GeoCities closing now?

All of our GeoCities customers can continue to enjoy their sites and GeoCities services until later this year. 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.

While the rise of Geocities followed an idea similar to that of Hotmail in terms of business model, it also invested in terms of features to build a community of users. It was at a point of time over a decade back amongst the 5 most popular site on the web, and at the time of Yahoo’s acquisition had around 3.5 million users on its system. And it’s market value stood at about $2.3 billion.

What lead to the fall was better publishing tools for people and perhaps a lack of innovation on Geocities front. As far as I remember, Geocities never offered more than initial 20 megs of space (anybody know) and 50 MB bandwidth. While it was more than enough in the early part of the millennium with a growing web world it didn’t really match. The advent of blogging took personal websites to a whole new level and changed the way websites were seen and treated.

Blogger and later WordPress with their non restrictive free service gave a wider scope for people to create their online identity and eventually led to the demise of free web hosting in general. Open source and database driven free web hosting also killed the static websites, and then the advent of social networks completely killed the need for a personal website for a lot of people – read MySpace and Hi5 and later Orkut and Facebook. No more music band sites, no more model portfolio, no more alumni communities.. no more Geocities, Angelfire or Lycos.

Geocities to many marked the beginning of web expression and its closure is sure to get a lot of the early web babies nostalgic.