Yahoo! shuts the doors on GeoCities

Yahoo! is closing its GeoCities personal homepage service, and with it will go an era of self-expression on the web that's largely been replaced by social networks and blogs.

GeoCities rose to power during an era when publishing on the internet meant setting up your own website. GeoCities simplified the process by helping people sidestep the complications of registering a domain and learning how to program HTML.

Yahoo! bought GeoCities for more than $2.9bn in dot-com-priced stock in 1999, when GeoCities had more than 1.1 million users. However, while the idea of having a personal presence on the internet has caught on, GeoCities turned out to be a backwater, not the mainstream.

In a note on the site, Yahoo! said: "We will be closing GeoCities later this year. We'll provide more details about closing GeoCities and how to save your site data this summer."

Still unclear is what exactly will become of GeoCities pages. New sign-ups are already no longer permitted but what about existing sites?

Yahoo! said: "You can continue to enjoy your website and GeoCities services until later this year. You don't need to change a thing right now - we just wanted you to let you know about the closure as soon as possible. We'll provide more details about closing GeoCities and how to save your site data this summer, and we will update the help centre with more details at that time."

That leaves open the possibility that Yahoo! will make it possible to move a site to another service, as it did when shutting down Yahoo! Photos, but in the current climate, it's probably best not to expect such a graceful transition option. Yahoo! wouldn't comment on its plans.

Yahoo! said another option for users would be to upgrade to its separate paid service, encouraging users after more features to upgrade to Yahoo!'s web hosting service.

Original article: Now closing: GeoCities, a relic of Web's early days from CNET News.com