Yahoo Discontinues Geocities Service This Year

April 25, 2009 - PRLog -- Founded in 1994 by David Bohnett and John Rezner and purchased by Yahoo in 1999 for an amount in excess of three billion dollars during the dot com boom Geocities is a web hosting service offering users an easy way to construct single page websites.

On Thursday April 23, 2009 Yahoo announced they will be discontinuing their Geocities service which at the current time hosts a vast amount of locale homepages. At the current time it is unclear what will become of all the pages currently hosted by Geocities but this answer will be announced by Yahoo later in the year. Yahoo has discontinued new memberships to Geocities and the service will be officially shut down later this year.

While Geocities provided a somewhat popular service I am not at all surprised to see it go. Recently Yahoo has discontinued a variety of their services including Farchase, Kickstart, and Yahoo for teachers, and will most likely be closing more. Yahoo is looking for new ways to compete in the hastily changing internet market and undoubtedly trying to improve their services to compete with social websites like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and of course the current search engine king, Google.

Geocities incorporated a user friendly interface and a fast way to build a web page. But, social websites like Facebook offer in essence the same thing while in addition giving users the means to network with others and a sense of privacy. Also, blogging websites like Blogger and Wordpress offer a somewhat similar service to Geocities while giving their users much more flexibility and options. There are just too many better alternatives to Geocities and Yahoo knows it. However, I do believe that it is Yahoo’s own fault that Geocities has fallen behind and rather than close it they should work on making it better.

Geocities already has the name. If you ask just about anyone (who hasn’t been living under a rock) if they have heard of Geocities they will most likely say yes. Yahoo neglected Geocities adding almost no new features to compete with social and blogging sites but rather watched as it became increasingly less popular and less used until it became the mess it is today. If Yahoo were to rid themselves of the many old, forgotten, and unused websites that litter Geocities as well as add some new social features they could turn it around and find themselves with the means to compete with similar services. It probably won’t happen but that’s just some food for thought.

The once popular Geocities will be closing this year and be added to the long list of discontinued services by Yahoo. What’s next to come is unclear, but what is clear to me is that Yahoo is undergoing some serious changes. The question is; will these changes be for the better? Or will Yahoo fail to find ways to compete with their competitors and slowly fade away from existence?

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