GeoCities demolished

Yahoo! plans to close GeoCities, the dot com era build-your-own-website operation it paid $4.6bn in stock for in 1999.

In a posting to its help pages yesterday, Yahoo! said it would stop accepting new GeoCities members immediately, then turn off the lights "later this year."

"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," Yahoo! said.

GeoCities prospered in the early days of the consumer web as an easy way for tech newcomers to build and host their own web page. It has long-since been rendered obsolete by newer social networking sites and improved web design applications.

Yahoo! promised to offer help to GeoCities users who want to preserve their data nearer closure time. ®