Bye bye Geocities!

Remember all those Geocities! websites full of info and personal pages, some 6-7 years ago? Yeah, me too! I’ve found lyrics, recipes, (sometimes) links to illegal software and very often personal pages.

Now, it seems that Yahoo! decided to let go of this service, probably as a response to the economic crisis and probably also for the failure in positioning correctly this great (at that time) service. Yahoo! decided this week that the service will no longer accept new customers and that will close somewhere at the end of this year. Of course, as any company with client service, Yahoo! stated that it will provide a strategy for the users to retrieve their content from the pages (just as they did when they shut down Yahoo! Photos and offered the option to move them to Flickr, service that I’m not using any more – Picasa rullz!)

What hurts indeed in this closure of Geocities is the fact that Yahoo! payed 4.6 billion (!!!) USD in ’99, when they acquired the service. Of course, the transaction was made mostrly with stock options, but… 4.6 billion is still 4.6 billion.

Anyway, as an exercise for the mind: just imagine how will the social networking market would look like if the 3.5 million hosted websites (in the ’90s!!!) should have been integrated/updated with the actual social tools (profiles, blogs, comments, etc etc)..

(source:REUTERS)