The Demise Of Geocities
Does anyone still remember the amazing animated gifs, the glaring backgrounds…ooops…sounds a bit like Myspace….
Yahoo has announced that they are closing down Geocities. For those youngsters who grew up only knowing MySpace and Facebook, Geocities was one of the first type of sites that allowed for ‘user generated content’ - in other words, people without any formal web design experience, to set up their own websites - for free.
Geocities’ demise came about due to a couple of reasons.
It is just so much easier today to set up a personal web page using sites such as MySpace and Facebook - the technology has moved on tremendously and Geocities just did not keep up. Also, hosting space became incredibly cheap over the past couple of years, which means that hosting costs are not a deterrend any more to setting up a website. General web design tools and blogging tools also took great strides forward and also make it easy for people to create their own sites.
The thing is just that Yahoo acquired Geocities for a big bunch of money - over 4 billion dollars in 1999, it was one of the first big deals of the ‘dotcom’ boom era. Yahoo could have done so much more with Geocities such as evolving the underlying software and architecture to be more up to date with the latest developments and thereby evolving into earlier versions of MySpace or Facebook. But they basically purchased Geocities for the userbase and did not really manage their investment the way that they could have.
Ah well, if you are feeling nostalgic for awful backgrounds, glittering text and random bling you can always go to MySpace.
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