Yahoo! is shutting down its free website service – GeoCities. For those of you that don’t know, GeoCities is/was one of the oldest free website companies on the internet. It was a website system that tried to build “communities” of different web pages which had similar themes. For example, many of you know that I started creating websites with a personal homepage called The Balrog’s Lair. At the time I started it (sophomore year of high school, I think) I was a huge wrestling fan and I intended to write some type of wrestling stuff on that homepage. As such, I was categorized in the “sports and recreation” neighborhood which was titled, “Colosseum.” In fact, the URL of my first web page was www.geocities.com/Colosseum/Track/5869/ Pretty unique, huh? 🙂

Literally thousands of young web entrepreneurs started out with free websites built at GeoCities. Most of us, of course, started on the site when it was privately owned. However, after a number of years (and a healthy number of subscribers), the entire system was sold to Yahoo and things went downhill from there. Yahoo cut the amount of bandwidth allowed to users and immediately instituted a pay-for-service option that gave the user essentially what they used to have for free. Lucky for me, it was around this time that I started dabbling in the actual purchase of domain names and hosting packages to manage my web needs.

Yahoo also shortened the URLs (which may have been best for everyone involved), but they shortened them to your user id. I don’t think that I hide my name from anyone on this blog, but I didn’t want my wrestling website to become geocities.com/jpalazzolo. How weird would that be?

Anyway, here is the message I received from Yahoo about the closing of GeoCities:

Very sad. Hopefully, someone will come along and try to buy the GeoCities asset from Yahoo and breathe some new life into this once great service for young web entrepreneurs and people who were just looking for a little place of their own online.