As announced a couple of months ago, Geocities will cease to exist today. Interestingly Yahoo does not have an upgrade or new alternative for this now homeless online population.
GeoCities was the biggest online community prior to the dotcom bubble burst. Yahoo purchased them for $3.57 billion at the height of the internet bubble, but the community was the precusor of MySpace and Facebook but no major additions and updates were ever developed for the portal.
LinkedIn and Facebook Groups and many other social media have taken the lead of GeoCities and their ‘homesteaders’ and developed their own niched communities run by its users.
Yahoo said that it was closing the site and would focus on assisting “customers build new relationships online”.
Adam Ostrow over at Mashable notes “It’s certainly not surprising that GeoCities is shutting down, as Yahoo has been in cost-cutting mode for months and the service would seem to have little fit in its current business”.
I am amazed they couldn’t monetize the visits despite the numerous ideas they could have adapted – such as Meetups or Twitter like conversations. User generated traffic and visitors is a big play these days, yet Yahoo is pushing forward with company created content sites .
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