GeoCities shares a story which only early internet know about. Geocities started in 1995 as an exclusive free webhosting service with subdomains: yourname.geocities.com.
The service gained a lot of popularity and became the single largest free hosting service. In 1999, the beat of internet, Yahoo bought the company and continued the service flawlessly. But the popularity was on gradual decline because of better and more featureful options by other free service providers. But still, alot of users sticked to GeoCities.
During the last one year, Yahoo! has been continous decline. It started with the Microsoft’s interest to acquire the company. Though Yahoo declined the offer in interest of it’s investors and users.
Why is GeoCities shutting Down?
The reason specified on Yahoo’s site is pretty much unfair for the consumers and reverse for the company:
We have decided to focus on helping our customers explore and build relationships online in other ways. Beginning on October 26, 2009, you will no longer be able to use GeoCities to maintain a free presence online — but we’re excited about the other services we have designed to help you connect with friends and family and share your activities and interests.
We recommend our award-winning Web Hosting service, which works a lot like GeoCities but includes a personalized domain name (such as widgetdesigns.com) and matching email, terrific new site building tools, unlimited disk space and bandwidth, premium customer support, and more. See more on moving to Web Hosting.
Clearly, they are no longer encouraging free services. Reason being, they are already having a drowning business and they are cutting costs wherever possible. Primary reasons had been loss of interest and dis-investment- (CEO Bartz brings Trouble to Yahoo! Investors: $2Million Shares Cashed-out)
Whatever is going on inside Yahoo, we have only glimpse of it but what we know for sure is- It’s Not right for the company, not right for the users. Yahoo’s CEO Bartz said“We Have Never Been a Search Company”. Wow! I remember, I saw it growing from “a Search” to “Everything”.
Hey Yahoo, whatever you are doing, you are getting worse.Your market share is falling, economic state is worse, one of the main Inspiration: Carl Icahn, resigned; I no longer see a hope with left out business : stinky search (bing), outdated Email, IM. I hope you don’t shudown developers API, widgets, webservices, which most developers still use.
I wish… Yahoo had listened to Google.
Yahoo was the first love for several Internet users.
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I started a group that now has a massive global presence, – on Yahoo/Geocities. However, – I soon migrated away from Yahoo because their forums, email & other features were prone to hacking and their advertising became OFFENSIVE (outright pornographic). Yes – their ADVERTISING! About the time an ad for “Joyful Anal Sex” appeared on our Geocities page – I knew it was time to migrate away. Upon complaining about these porn spams, Yahoo’s response was to delete my primary user account and with it died some 50+ highly traffick’d groups (as opposed to the smut that populated so many of their forums)! And those 50+ (out of 100+) groups accounted for HUGE web traffic into Yahoo (often the #1 in their respective category). As I said – my group/s were on their way to a global scope. Yahoo’s service continued to remain substandard and their filters didn’t know the difference between mature content vs. porn -and Yahoo constantly wanted to pigeonhole us into the latter. Finally the decision was made when Yahoo unilaterally decided to reformat its groups and by doing so reset/replaced every group image (with irrelevant image content) and rearranged the layout so that text references within the groups – to links elsewhere on the page – no longer made sense. As a result, we have migrated away from Yahoo and left the 100+ Yahoo groups to rust – no longer moderated nor accepting new content. Yahoo’s stockholders need to FIRE the CEO and maybe the entire board – because at this pace: Yahoo is going the way of GeoCities.
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