Geocities Shuts Down
Thirteen years ago I created my first web site. I hosted it on the free website service Geocities. I called the site Your Turn To Play. It was a site that was dedicated to Formula One Car Racing. I followed every race and made notes on the race and then posted report on the Monday following. This was back in the days when a dialup line was a luxury, so the report waited until I got to work on the Monday.Then as time went on and I got busier with family life, my website died. I never thought about it until recently I heard that Yahoo are canning GeoCities.Here`s Yahoo`s explanation for canning the site:"We have enjoyed hosting web sites created by Yahoo! users all over the world, and we`re proud of the community you`ve built. However, we have decided to focus on helping our customers explore and build relationships online in other ways. As of October 26, 2009, you will no longer be able to use GeoCities to maintain a free presence online -- but we`re excited about the other services we have designed to help you connect with friends and family and share your activities and interests."So what does this mean?In short it means that Yahoo wants some form of remuneration.Yahoo claim, quite correctly, that GeoCities was not just used by legit users, but distributors of Malware and Spam were also customers of theirs.Prince in the Eighties claimed that he was going to party like it was 1999. Yahoo bought GeoCities in 1999 for about 3.5 billion dollars of stock. The original deal was not that successful. Many users left Geocities because of the new terms of service.GeoCities was formed in the early Nineties. It traded publically in 1998. It was unique due to the fact that the original idea was to have a site that belonged to a city that was associated to the theme of your site. Some see GeoCities as the forerunner of todays social networking.As of the 26th of October 2009, Geocities will is no-more.For more information please see www.pcworld.com.
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