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Yahoo closing free Web host GeoCities, where pre-commercial homepages still live

11:18 AM Fri, Apr 24, 2009 | Permalink |

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By Sheila Lennon |

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Nail in coffin: Yahoo! announced at GeoCities Help, GeoCities will close later this year.

Yahoo! GeoCities: Get a free web site with easy-to-use site building tools contradicts itself. GeoCities Help:

GeoCities will close later this year....we encourage anyone interested in a full-featured web hosting plan to consider upgrading to our award-winning Yahoo! Web Hosting service.

Wiki take: Yahoo! GeoCities is a web hosting service founded by David Bohnett and John Rezner in late 1994 as Beverly Hills Internet (BHI).[1]

What it is: 15 Mb with 3Gb monthly bandwidth limit. Banner or Pop-up ads on each page. Browser or FTP uploads. On-line editor. CGI scripts: counter and guestbook.

What it was: In 1997, on the third birthday of GeoCities,

The GeoCities story encapsulates the growth and excitement of the homepage phenomenon. Where else can you hear a million unmediated voices? There's also wonderful content; I know because I've featured GeoCities homesteaders many times.

So here's a tip of the hat to David Bohnett. The professionalism of GeoCities lent credence to the self-publishing movement at a critical moment in Net history, when it looked like corporations were going to overrun the people's medium.

Geek take 1: So Long, GeoCities: We Forgot You Still Existed. PCWorld:

GeoCities was born as "Beverly Hills Internet" in the winter of 1995. Its parents, David Bohnett and John Rezner, wanted to create a virtual community that mimicked the real world, with pages hosted in "cyber cities" and other similarly nauseating concepts.
Both teenagers and first-generation Internet dorks (known then as "former SysOps") flocked to the service, setting up personal pages in the "cyber cities" of their choice.

Geek take 2: Geocities To Shut Down, Millions of Geeky '90s Kids Get Nostalgic -- And Some St. Louis Sites Are Affected.

This was the genius of GeoCities: They were the first company to empower the nascent online generation, to make it easy to create and share content and fandom -- but without the pressure and social-networking insanity attached to such sites now. Cheesy, yeah, but it was a more innocent Internet time.

I guess if you were a geeky kid then, the GeoCities sites you knew were other geeky kids'. Some were that , others were someone's personal passion, knowledge and expertise in a niche interest, created in hand-coded html or, later, with Netscape Composer or PageMill or Front Page.

Still on GeoCities:

· Pauline Kael reviews. An archive of the work of Pauline Kael, who reviewed movies for the New Yorker from 1968 to 1991.

· Violin/Viola FAQ - BestStudentViolins.com. (The site url is actually a domain alias for http://www.geocities.com/conniesunday/FAQ.html).

Moving on: Is YouTube The Geocities Of Online Video? Tod Sacerdoti at Video Insider.