GeoCities, a relic of an different web era, shuttered by Yahoo
(Read article summary)It's the end of the road for GeoCities, the popular hosting service purchased by Yahoo in 1999.
Today, geeks of all stripes took to the blogs to air their memories of GeoCities, a hosting service founded by David Bohnett and John Rezner in 1994, and purchased by Yahoo half a decade later. In closing GeoCities, Yahoo is drawing the curtain on an era: from now on, users will be required to enroll in a fee-based hosting service.
"We have enjoyed hosting web sites created by Yahoo users all over the world, and we're proud of the community you've built," Yahoo representatives wrote in a message to customers. "However, we have decided to focus on helping our customers explore and build relationships online in other ways."
In recognition of the passing of GeoCities, the folks at XKCD this morning dressed up their site as a faux-Geocities page, with blinking stars, that familiar GeoCities font, a heavily-pixelated logo, a neon green page-view counter – displaying an inaccurate count – and a bunch of extraneous HTML.
