Yahoo Quietly Pulls The Plug On Geocities
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Is it me, or do all portal-type services seem to go through the same curve, since CompuServe to Facebook? Unified interface and handy tools excite early adopters, interest scales in sigmoid fashion, plateaus, and diminishing returns set in as the signal-to-noise ratio declines, followed by profitability.
It seems to happen over and over again, like waves on the seashore. Many people clearly want a 'home' on the net with a structured community...much the same way people like suburban tract housing with homeowner's associations. Every few years someone makes fat money by finding a new way to cater to these people, few of whom want to maintain their own domain or pages. Numerous me-too sites grab a small slice of this (like facespace.com...really). 5 years later, it's like that nightclub down the street that used to be so cool.
"Many people clearly want a 'home' on the net with a structured community..."
If you're an industry social media analyst, then you're one sloppy SOB and you need to tidy up your essays.
but,
If you're not paid full time to do social media research, or if you're not doing a PhD on the subject, then please accept my humble "WTF", for you are one smart SOB. What you have produced is the meeting of the American Mathematical Society and 4Chan: an epic lore of the interwebs and a testament to your eternal pwning of intellectual rigor. You the (wo?)man, Sensei!
It's like any entertainment, if it gets stale, people move on. I also think of all those post WW2 neighborhood restaurants and bars that slowly sunk into oblivion.
Here's just one opinion piece on the restaurant topic that lists the following:
Stage 1: Grand Opening & Awesome Service
Stage 2: Building Towards Peak Crowds
Stage 3: Staff and/or Owner Turnover
Stage 4: Sinking Towards Shit Ass Service
Stage 5: Disaster!!!
Funny how 11MM uniques is not enough for a Yahoo! product where as if a small startup was doing that much (and monetizing better than cp{c,a,m} ads) they would be making a killing...
It's never going to make very much money, so why waste any resources on it at all?
Now's the time to wget --mirror them
So, uh, just think about it too much for a few hours and it might come back to you.
wget --mirror http://www.geocities.com/my/path
Stripping out the auto-added ads was easy enough to not be a big deal. But hey, if you can actually remember your passwords, more power to you. Maybe if I get bored, I'll try to figure it out and see if I had anything I had uploaded there for posterity, but I don't think so.
Note: Why don't they just sell Geocities to someone who'll keep it going?
If you publicly mothball GC though, then you can maybe get a fraction (5-10% at most I'd guess) to become paying users at SOME level.
Even at that meager conversion rate, I see that being a better call then selling the remnants of GC off.
"Existing GeoCities accounts have not changed. You can continue to enjoy your web site and GeoCities services until later this year. You don't need to change a thing right now — we just wanted you to let you know about the closure as soon as possible. We'll provide more details about closing GeoCities and how to save your site data this summer, and we will update the help center with more details at that time."
http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/geocities/geocities-05.html
I think it's a real loss for Yahoo. Even if it doesn't bring in that much money, it is 11.5 unique visitors a month.
I dunno, maybe if we had a way to keep it around but under a lock and key. Then we could release our incessant teenage babbling's when we think they are "cute" rather than "just crazy enough" to draw the ire of some h.r. sheriff.