On October 26, 2009 Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO) decided to shut down GeoCities. This took place about 10 years after Yahoo! bought GeoCities for $4.7 billion. GeoCities had gone public about one year before and was profitable. GeoCities had a bit of sentimental value for everyone that created a website in the 1990’s. I remember the first time I designed a website, I made it through GeoCities. It was around 1998 and it was South Park fan page when I was in 10th grade. Anyway GeoCities is no longer with us… or is it?
GeoCities has returned in the form of Reocities. A man named Jacques decided to download the content and websites. Then he republished the content on Reocities. About 600,000 GeoCities websites were rescued before shutting down and put on ReoCities. “On the 20th of October 2009, about a week before GeoCities was really going to close, someone else posted a link, pointing to some interesting pages. These were on an old GeoCities account, about to be erased. It wasn’t what I would call a masterpiece, and I didn’t agree with all of it, but it seemed like it was worth keeping,” wrote Jacques in a detailed post about how he pulled off the endeavor.
It is pretty fun to check out the top level “neighborhoods” listed on ReoCities and selecting random numbers. This way you can check out a piece of Internet history.
There is a certain nostalgic feeling that early web developers will have when they hear that Yahoo! is shutting down GeoCities.
Back in the 90’s, GeoCities had certain communities (neighborhoods) that people could join. Some of the most popular neighborhoods were WallStreet, SoHo, Hollywood, Heartland, and Tokyo. If you weren’t on GeoCities back then you were a nobody. Dare I even compare it to the Facebook of its generation back then. GeoCities had a way for beginning web developers to create their own websites. It was one of the Internet’s first breakthrough websites.
GeoCities was initially a web hosting company when it was founded by David Bohnett and John Rezner around 1994. The company was called Beverly Hills Internet before switching in 1995. Around June 1997, GeoCities became the fifth most popular website on the Internet
After growing at a rapid pace despite placing advertisements around the website, the company went public on the NASDAQ under the symbol GCTY. The IPO price was $17 and it rose to a peak of $100 per share. Yahoo! bought the company in January 1999 for $3.57 billion.
Between the time that Yahoo! acquired the company and today, web hosting and template designs have become increasingly competitive at a rapid pace. This is why it is time go for GeoCities. It will be missed as much as we miss the Netscape browser and AOL CDs arriving in our mailbox. The service will be shutting down later this year. Goodbye GeoCities, we had a good run eh?
I put up a timeline above of how GeoCities looked every year and what the services offered were. Click on the image for the bigger version.
