Yahoo ha annunciato che a fine anno chiuderà Geocities.
We have decided to discontinue the process of allowing new customers to sign up for GeoCities accounts as we focus on helping our customers explore and build new relationships online in other ways. We will be closing GeoCities later this year.
Geocities aveva aperto l’accesso a internet, alla home page personalizzata e gratuita, ai primi siti individuali. Ci si sceglieva un quartiere e si iniziava pionieristiamente a tirare la propria Pagina Casa.
Poi è venuto il blog, i social network, di tutto di più ed in effetti il senso di Geocities si era sfumato. Forse andava reinventato più che chiuso.
In Geocities ci sono ancora milioni di home pages spesso vagamente abbandonate. Diventerà una sorta di Spoon River digitale ?
Not with a bang, but with a whimper. Yahoo! is unceremoniously closing GeoCities, one of the original web-hosting services acquired by Yahoo! in 1999 for $2.87 billion. (Fun venture fact: Fred Wilson’s Flatiron Partners was an investor). In a message on Yahoo!’s help site, the company said that it would be shuttering Geocities, a free web-hosting service, later this year and will not be accepting any new customers. Existing customers will still be able to access use GeoCities but Yahoo! is encouraging these customers to upgrade to Yahoo!’s paid Web Hosting service.
GeoCities’ traffic has been falling over the past year. According to ComScore, GeoCities unique visitors in the U.S. fell 24 percent in March to 11.5 million unique visitors from 15.1 million in March of 2008. Back in October, 2006, it had 18.9 million uniques.
One of the pioneers of web-hosting sites, GeoCities gave users personal publishing tools and created “neighborhoods” within its web platform for users to be able to create pages, add a picture, text, a guest book and a website counter. Long before MySpace, Geocities was known as a place where teenagers, college students, and eventually others could impose their own garish taste upon the rest of the world.