GeoCities is closing

[charlie]

http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/geocities/geocities-05.html

Goodbye starry black backgrounds, under constructions icons, centered text, jumbotron-bordered tables, and loud 'n proud hit counters.

[RoyGBiv]

1. I shall shed a tear ...

(for the salt content on my popcorn)

:popcorn:

[charlie]

3. No twinge of nostalgia

for a more innocent era? You don't want to Smack the Monkey and Win a Prize just one more time? You're a hard man :D

Skooch over. I brought my own salt.

This feels like a delayed pop from the dot com bubble. It's been a never ending surprise to me that GeoCities kept on these past 10 years, like a strange unchanging museum piece.

One thing about this that gives me the happy itches is the thought of how much money Rupert Murdoch is probably losing as the owner of GeoCities 2.0. Last year Google lost a HALF BILLION dollars with YouTube. If Google hasn't yet figured out how to monetize YouTube, it's almost certain MySpace is reaming Rupert's wallet. Could be why the old grouch was recently thundering about how Google was getting a "free ride" from his news sites. I'm dying for him to demand licensing fees for pullquotes and Google telling him to go suck eggs, so his sites will fall out of their aggregators and essentially cease to exist. Then the trajectory of his web revenues will match the ever-dwindling income of his print empire. I hope, I hope, I hope.

[Pool Hall Ace]

2. Oh my gosh . . .

I think I may have created one of the pages you describe . . . ten years ago or so!! :rofl:

[charlie]

4. Didn't we all?

The impulse to lard a webpage with all kinds of ugly hasn't died though, it just moved to MySpace. Bad as it was back then, at least you were never assaulted with 6 running videos and Killswitch Engage blaring on top of it all.

[EvolveOrConvolve]

5. It's a business decision for sure

From the FAQ's on that link:

Can I prepare for GeoCities closing now?
All of our GeoCities customers can continue to enjoy their sites and GeoCities services until later this year. You don't need to change your service today, but we encourage anyone interested in a full-featured web hosting plan to consider upgrading to our award-winning Yahoo! Web Hosting service.

Yahoo! Web Hosting 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

Plain and simple: why give away this free pseudo web hosting service (Geocities) when they can charge their customers for real hosting accounts? Personally, I think it's a great thing that Geocities is going away. It's been the men's room wall of the internet for several years now.