
Yahoo Quietly Pulls The Plug On Geocities - vaksel
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/04/23/yahoo-quietly-pulls-the-plug-on-geocities/
======
anigbrowl
And so, AngelFire had finally triumphed...

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.

~~~
mahmud
Please pursue that thought to a full blown article. You might be onto
something here:

"Many people clearly want a 'home' on the net with a structured community..."

~~~
anigbrowl
This is all ^his fault. <http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dd93s8qb_37dqrnxjdk>

~~~
mahmud
anigbrowl:

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!

~~~
anigbrowl
:blush: thank you. Just some ideas that were kicking round while I was failing
to do much work today. You've inspired me to develop it further though.

------
aditya
_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._

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...

~~~
timcederman
Depends on per user cost.

~~~
tomjen
For geocities? That can't possibly be that high.

~~~
eli
Also factor in tech support costs and the fact that it must earn truly
terrible CPM on the ads...

It's never going to make very much money, so why waste any resources on it at
all?

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chops
I'm glad that they're not immediately deleting existing sites. I have old
geocities sites up that I never really backed up (from when I was a teen) and
I have no idea what the username or passwords are.

Now's the time to wget --mirror them

~~~
gamache
A few months back, I wanted to get some orphaned files from my ancient
Geocities page. I remembered my username (now of the form _username.geo_ ) but
the password wasn't coming to me. I tried to recover my password but none of
the 20 email addresses I gave them was right. Eventually, after being on the
phone with customer service and brainstorming every email address I have ever
had, the password came back to me -- the original, four-letter dictionary word
assigned as the default when I signed up in early 1995.

So, uh, just think about it too much for a few hours and it might come back to
you.

~~~
chops
Conveniently, I don't have anything that's inaccessible from the main page, so
a simple

    
    
      wget --mirror http://www.geocities.com/my/path
    

was enough to get everything I needed.

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.

------
zandorg
It's time to admit that the Web was never intended for long-term storage, with
staunch personal sites the rarity, and fads, and news (up to 4 weeks old) is
the trend. It's just a total failure, archive-wise.

Note: Why don't they just sell Geocities to someone who'll keep it going?

~~~
citizenparker
If you sell Geocities, then you can't convert them to paying customers of
Yahoo web hosting. You can't convert them to Yahoo anything at that point.

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.

------
kqr2
I wonder if the internet archive could make a final complete archive before it
closes.

~~~
charlesju
It's not closing right? Just stopping new users from creating accounts.

~~~
Dmatig
I think it's closing later this year

"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>

------
larryfreeman
People can now transfer content to a blog site, Ning, or a place like
HubPages.Com (the site where I work).

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.

------
marcusbooster
I'm always conflicted on these things. For privacy's sake, I don't want every
little thing I posted on my angelfire page many years ago to be a part of the
world's permanent record on me. But I can't help but feel we are losing a lot
of valuable information about ourselves when these things go.

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.

~~~
Derferman
As previously mentioned in the thread, a wget --mirror
<http://www.geocities.com/my/path> will save your site.

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landist
Good time for Weebly to issue a statement (press release, etc.) calling for
all Geocities customers. It's a "Statue of Liberty" moment - "Give me your
tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe a free website" - Be
Bold Weebly... call Yahoo out and get some free press.

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kulkarnic
What a reminder how the Web keeps changing. I remember when I thought
Geocities was kinda cool. Can't really remember too many sites like that--
which remained essentially unchanged, yet had such a userbase for so long. In
fact, I can't think of one other.

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calvin
GeoCities was my first site. Being given a chance to play with HTML (4.0 was
still cutting edge) is what drew me into the tech world and led to the career
I now have. I'm sad to see it go, but it's function has been replaced by
numerous other sites and Yahoo! doesn't have any reason to keep it
going/growing.

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JeffL
Do you guys think this is more a case of a shrinking niche or Yahoo being
incompetent with its acquisition?

~~~
bigbang
With social media exploding and others (like Google pages) providing ad fre(or
less annoying ads), I would think this is shrinking and makes sense to shut
down.

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ReTelTech
Wow...I've had a GeoCities site since 1997. I think the last time I updated it
was in...2002?

------
ensignavenger
Hmm, I always preferred Angelfire. My first websites were on Angelfire, years
ago.

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j_baker
I'm surprised to find out that geocities still exists.

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intellectronica
ah, it's the end of an era ... i'll miss it.

