There’s a note on the Yahoo! website that reads: “Sorry, new GeoCities accounts are no longer available.” It continues: “After careful consideration, we have decided to close GeoCities later this year. We’ll share more details this summer.”
As I recall, GeoCities was one of the first places to develop websites for free in the mid-1990's and probably where thousands of designers got their first start in the Web publishing field. The site had a strong community following offering free Web hosting and, of course, as you can imagine you'd literally tire of seeing hordes of the 'geocities.com' moniker in the URL of thousands of websites. You can get further details on this remarkable Internet pioneer at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeoCities.
It goes without saying that brands of this caliber were instrumental in the early push of the Web. Even though the brand will fade out eventually, there are several things that will last. Social networking sites were influenced by the GeoCities community building model and even GooglePages, alive and well still, owes a big thank you to the founders. No need to feel sorry for David Bohnett and John Rezner who started it in 1994 under Beverly Hills Internet and sold it to Yahoo for a cool $2.87 billion in 1999. Regardless of what Yahoo! has recouped in the time of ownership, you know it probably falls significantly under the acquisition cost. But Yahoo! remains a big player in shared Web hosting and site design and that will still continue thanks to GeoCities.
Today we celebrate our like (and respect) for the Web pro
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