A web era came to an end Monday as Yahoo officially boarded up GeoCities, the long-neglected pioneer of personal web pages. GeoCities — acquired by Yahoo in 1999 for $2.9 billion — was once on the cutting edge of making it easy for individual users to publish their lives on the web, but long ago was eclipsed by the social-networking innovations of Facebook and MySpace.
In a posting on the GeoCities help page, Yahoo said: “We have enjoyed hosting web sites created by Yahoo! users all over the world, and we’re proud of the community you’ve built. However, we have decided to focus on helping our customers explore and build relationships online in other ways.”
Yahoo is pointing GeoCities users to its web-hosting service, which it said offers personalized domain names, matching e-mail, and a range of site-building tools.
Web ‘Training Wheels’
“One of my first web sites was GeoCities way back in the day,” reminisced social-media expert Chris Brogan in an e-mail. “It was great for giving us training wheels in using the web,” said the coauthor of Trust Agents: Using the Web to Build Influence, Improve Reputation and Earn Trust.
“It failed because the mission didn’t matter once more robust tools came about. They weren’t really good communities to begin with, but they were workable. Yahoo could’ve killed it five or six years ago and it’d be OK,” Brogan added.
The closing underscores a prime concern of web historians — sites like GeoCities may not contain earth-shattering content, but taken as a whole they represent an important step in understanding the web’s evolution. For all those personal pages to be lost would create a hole in the social history of the Net.
Preserving the Early Web
Fortunately, many GeoCities pages will be preserved at the Internet Archive, a nonprofit digital library based in San Francisco….