

Yahoo’s $3.65 Billion Mistake: Yahoo Closes GeoCities - insomniamedia
http://crenk.com/yahoos-3-65-billion-mistake-yahoo-closes-geocities/

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brown9-2
Just because Yahoo spent $3.65 billion on this acquisition 10 years ago, and
now they are shutting down the service, does not mean that the $3.65 billion
was wasted.

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.

~~~
pg
They got one of the most important things they wanted from Geocities, which
was to remain the #1 (= most unique visitors) web site. That counted for a lot
back then. Competitors like Lycos were pulling all kinds of tricks to jack up
visitor numbers, like getting the NFL to put the Super Bowl web site at
superbowl.lycos.com. One could argue that Yahoo overpaid to remain #1, but it
was worth something.

That was practically the only thing Yahoo got from Geocities though.

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raganwald
Cynical thought:

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?"

~~~
fizx
> IOW, is Geocities really consuming management attention? is it losing
> buckets of money? Is it diluting Yahoo! brand?

Maybe it just has some good engineers tied up?

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andr
"To quickly download your published files, visit your GeoCities web site,
right-click on each page, and choose Save Page As... from the menu that
appears."

Ouch! They could at least provide an export tool.

~~~
dragonquest
True, however wget seems like a good option. Try

<http://www.nowindows.net/wp/?p=94>

~~~
zandorg
It 503's if too many pages are requested at once...

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...](http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/geocities/close/close-17.html)

------
tibbon
Textfiles has been working hard to make an archive of Geocities. I need to
call Jason and see how that went.

~~~
Mark_B
I wonder if anybody did something similar for Compuserve's version
(ourworld.cs.com) before it closed up in July.

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mleonhard
My first webpage was on GeoCities. I learned HTML and made my own bullet
graphics. I scanned a tablecloth and made a tiling background with Paint Shop
Pro. This was all on Windows 3.1 and IE2, if I remember correctly.

Those were the days. :)

~~~
brk
Wow, Windows 3.1. The TCP/IP stack on that was horrible, surprised to managed
to get online ;)

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clutchski
let its gifs spin forever in our minds.

~~~
pavel_lishin
"Under destruction"

~~~
maukdaddy
Does this mean I need to adjust my webring? ;)

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GiraffeNecktie
So was GeoCities the FaceBook of 1999?

~~~
TheBranca18
No. Not even close.

~~~
tibbon
No?

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.

~~~
TheBranca18
I guess I didn't think of it that way. I was thinking more of the barrier for
a regular user to get started. From what I remember, the wizard for a casual
user wasn't that great, so knowing HTML was a necessity. But I could be wrong.

~~~
Kirby
Perhaps, but the perception of learning HTML being a barrier to entry was much
smaller back then. People were excited to be part of something new, and didn't
really balk at having to learn something. Totally different mentality today.

~~~
tibbon
HTML was a bit easier, and few cared about web standards or accessibility- as
long as it worked. We didn't have much javascript (and what we had was
counters and similar), XML, RSS, Ajax, Rails sites, etc.

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...

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dotcoma
well, GeoCities sure brought them a ton of users, and even if they were
expensive compared to how Google or Facebook got their users, it was different
back then, and buying a successful company may have been less expensive (and
successful, at least) in the end than doing a lot of pointless tv commercials.

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...

~~~
meterplech
they are focusing on their core-competencies. yahoo can't be the best at
everything, so they are going to sell the things that are distracting them
from the goods

~~~
padmapper
But as far as I can tell, the main thing they're good at is being a one-stop
shop...

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theklub
I hope all of that information was saved somewhere. Although I'm sure most of
it turned into wikipedia pages.

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jimmyrcom
Yahoo isn't dead yet? Don't forget their podcast.com Mark Cuban bs and saying
$37 a share was too low for a microsoft aquisition.

~~~
skinnymuch
Their stock is pretty solid still.

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armadilko
Yep they have to consolidate their business there is a lot of waste there.

