Geocities is no more

For anyone interested in the internet leave alone blogging, the fact that Geocities has been shut-down seems to invoke a tinge of sadness. Geocities was started way back in 1994 and met extraordinary success.

Yahoo bought Geocities for a massive $3.5 billion at the height of the dot-com bubble. It was quite an overpriced acquisition as Geocities only had 1 million users. Rupert Murdoch bought Myspace for almost 1/7th of that price with almost 100 times more users.

Lost Oppurtunity

• Despite the price Yahoo paid, Geocities was a excellent acquisition. It had a very active community.
• Yahoo with its access to money and expertise could have turned Geocities into Facebook or something even bigger.
• Along with a lot of things over the years Yahoo got wrong, handling of Geocities was also one of them.

Birth of Blogging

Geocities along with Lycos, were offering web hosting of pages on the internet before anyone else was doing it. This lead to many users expressing themselves online. It provided an outlet for photographers, artists and most importantly writers to express themselves without needing to look for publishers. Those were the early days when people from various fields with expertise ended up sharing their views online with their own homepage.

In those bylanes of Geocities and Lycos the concepts of blogging were born. So as a professional Blogger and all those other bloggers and writers who wrote their first articles on the net using Geocities and then moved to Blogger or WordPress, there is sense of gratitude for what Geocities acheived and also sadness that it is no more.