Yahoo’s $3.65 Billion Mistake: Yahoo Closes GeoCities
crenk.com
crenk.com
The article makes no mention of technology, users, services, etc, that may have been integrated into Yahoo from Geocities - which certainly would not be a waste.
Just because they are now terminating the original service does not mean that the acquisition was a waste.
That was practically the only thing Yahoo got from Geocities though.
Is it really important to shutter these services to "focus on their core competencies" or is it really important to give Wall Street the appearance of doing something, anything?
IOW, is Geocities really consuming management attention? is it losing buckets of money? Is it diluting Yahoo! brand?
Or is this just a way of showing the world that management is "getting serious" and "making changes?"
Maybe it just has some good engineers tied up?
Ouch! They could at least provide an export tool.
However, you can submit a link to the Internet Archive and they'll spider that Geocities site. I asked the IA to save all that data. I don't know if it was because of my suggestion, and it's still not a direct copy of the whole of Geocities, but it's a good thing. (Note: Yahoo links to the IA 'add url' thing, and it's really prominent in the Geocities help pages, so I think they've done a good job).
http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/geocities/close/close-17.ht...
Those were the days. :)
While scale wise it obviously wasn't, in the mid to late 90's it was the place that most people had their first websites and communities grow. People act like 'the wall' on FB is something new. Hello? Guestbooks.
Many of the sites were made in something like Frontpage even. There were templates and site makers, but also most people kept the stuff super simple.
And just because it was more complex doesn't mean it wasn't important. It was the easiest thing to come along. Before that you had to set up a web server, buy a domain, etc...
When GeoCities was in its prime it was pretty significant. Between some of the core features of GeoCities and add-ons like guestbooks, webrings, ICQ badges, etc., there was a good degree of "social networking", for the state of things at the time.
BTW, getting rid of Yahoo! Games, Yahoo! Shopping, Zimbra (given how poor the current Yahoo! Mail is) and del.icio.us does not seem very wise to me...