Yahoo Shuts Down Geocities

Posted on April 23, 2009

Yahoo has shut down the Geocities website. Geocities was a free website service and online community. It was one of the hottest properties on the Internet during the late 90s. Yahoo overpaid for the service is 1999, paying $4.9 billion for it in a stock deal.

CNET calls Geocities a "relic of Web's early days." PC World says "So Long, GeoCities: We Forgot You Still Existed."

The Geocities website now contains the following message.

After careful consideration, we have decided to close GeoCities later this year. We'll share more details this summer. For now, please sign in or visit the help center for more information.

Yahoo has also posted a faq about the closing. Yahoo will be closing Geocities accounts by the end of the year. The faq says, "Later this year we will be closing all GeoCities accounts and web sites. We'll send you more details this summer."

It remains to be seen whether the failure of Geocities is a lesson for today's ultra hot web communities like MySpace and Facebook.