Yahoo! today without warning updated its GeoCities page notifying visitors that new accounts are no longer available and that existing ones will be shut down by the end of the year.
“Later this year we will be closing all GeoCities accounts and web sites,” reads Yahoo!’s help section. “We have decided to discontinue the process of allowing new customers to sign up for GeoCities accounts as we focus on helping our customers explore and build new relationships online in other ways.”
“We'll provide more details about closing GeoCities and how to save your site data this summer,” the company said.
Will Yahoo! be replacing GeoCities with another free website hosting service?
“No, Yahoo! does not offer another free hosting service. Instead we recommend our award-winning Yahoo! Web Hosting service, which includes a personalized domain name (such as widgetdesigns.com) and matching email, new site building tools, unlimited disk space and bandwidth, premium customer support, and more.”
It seems the internet has moved away from providing users with an open playground such as GeoCities and towards more structured, uniform systems such as MySpace.
Did you have a GeoCities website? Is it still online? If so, share it with us in the comments!
