News has reached us of the soon-to-be passing of GeoCities.com. Its adopted parent Yahoo! Inc has decided that it can no longer live with dignity and will soon pull the plug on the comatose Yahoo! GeoCities. In the 1990s, GeoCities was the hottest place of Web 1.0., where you could create a free website with those weird long URLs like geocities.com/RodeoDrive/102538/. Purchased by Yahoo! in January 1999 for no less than three billion dollars, the popularity of GeoCities slumped after Yahoo! imposed restrictive terms of use.
The passing of this iconic Internet site is interesting for two reasons. Firstly, GeoCities (and its competitors like Tripod and Angelfire) were an important catalyst for the development of a World Wide Web with massive user-generated content. Secondly, Yahoo!’s incompetent handling of the GeoCities franchise gives interesting pointers about how online consumers will vote with their feet and abandon a once popular site when its terms of service are no longer to their liking.
In Memoriam GeoCities (1994-2009)
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