For some, the news may have been overdue, but according to an official Yahoo FAQ, Geocities will be closing its city doors later this year.
As of now, new applications are no longer being taken. Clicking on the Geocities homepage now brings up a 'not available' sign, although Yahoo have assured existing users that their websites will still continue to function until the entire site is discontinued later in the year.
For those not up to score with the rise and fall of Geocities, the website once represented the world's largest free website hosting service. It inspired dozen of inferior clones, in a race to give users of the mid 90s a venue for creating their own websites; most were designed with rudimentary HTML skills and plenty of heart.
Cities were named after their popular real-life counterparts, including Hollywood, which housed thousands of celebrity loving fansites. Homesteaders (the name given to Geocities web citizens) numbered in the millions and by 1997, it was the fifth largest website on the web. And this was long before Google happened on the scene.
Following a highly successful NASDAQ launch, Geocities shares traded as high as US$100 - at the height of the dot com bubble. In 1998, Yahoo paid over US$3 billion for the community, and quickly changed the look and design of the site to the dissatisfaction of its huge userbase and has been immensely unpopular ever since.
The end of Geocities was predicted in the early 2000's, as Yahoo struggled to make the site financially viable. It's been a minor miracle that it's even lasted this long.
Thankfully, Wikipedia contains a wonderful history of Geocities, so that future web generations will know what it was really like to create a functioning website in the ancient web 1.0 days.
Geocities may no longer be open to the public, but it's likely that its huge influence on up and coming designers, programmers and other web users won't easily be forgotten.
