Carol Bartz does not mess around. Ever since taking the helm from the company's long-demonized Jerry Yang, the new Yahoo CEO has made it very clear that her primary objective is streamlining the struggling search giant. The latest casualty of the company's cuts is Geocities. Yes, Geocities is still around--or it was, until now.
Yahoo, which purchased the site building operation back in 1999, quietly closed it down this week--barring new users from signing up with the service. People visiting the site are greeted with the simple message, “Sorry, new GeoCities accounts are no longer availavle." Existing users can still access their accounts, but Yahoo has begun aggressively pushing them to its premium Web Hosting.
Once the cream of the Webhosting crop, Geocities (which cost Yahoo a cool $2.87 billion) had been floundering in recent year, likely due in no small part to the success of free blogging apps like Blogger and Wordpress.com.
While it's understandable that Yahoo would want to pull its resources away from the site, I can't help but get a little sentimental on this one. The first Website I ever created was hosted on Geocities--actually, the first several were. I know I'm not alone on this one. Any other fellow Geocities ex-pats out there want to chime in?
Yahoo, which purchased the site building operation back in 1999, quietly closed it down this week--barring new users from signing up with the service. People visiting the site are greeted with the simple message, “Sorry, new GeoCities accounts are no longer availavle." Existing users can still access their accounts, but Yahoo has begun aggressively pushing them to its premium Web Hosting.
Once the cream of the Webhosting crop, Geocities (which cost Yahoo a cool $2.87 billion) had been floundering in recent year, likely due in no small part to the success of free blogging apps like Blogger and Wordpress.com.
While it's understandable that Yahoo would want to pull its resources away from the site, I can't help but get a little sentimental on this one. The first Website I ever created was hosted on Geocities--actually, the first several were. I know I'm not alone on this one. Any other fellow Geocities ex-pats out there want to chime in?
