Yahoo! GeoCities Closes its Doors For Ever
Yahoo! GeoCities, the free web site service offering tools for early Internet surfers to publish their own web pages, closed its doors.
In the 1990s, when most hosting options were extremely expensive, GeoCities gave anyone the opportunity to build a custom web page for free and secure a small amount of virtual storage to keep their pictures and documents. Indeed, GeoCities’s free hosting space was the home for thousands of personal web pages and became perhaps the most significant virtual museum in the recent history.
According to Alexa, GeoCities is still among the top 200 most-trafficked sites on the Web. In 1999, the network was the third most-visited web site on the Internet. Now, after locking its doors, millions of pages have been taken offline.
Early this week, Yahoo stated in an announcement:
"…we have decided to focus on helping our customers explore and build relationships online in other ways. Beginning on October 26, 2009, you will no longer be able to use GeoCities to maintain a free presence online - but we’re excited about the other services we have designed to help you connect with friends and family and share your activities and interests.”
GeoCities discontinued accepting new registrations earlier this year. Only existing users could update their pages before the actual closure. During that period, they were offered to move their sites to Yahoo's web hosting service, costing $4.99 per month for the first year.
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The closing of the GeoCities will be a big loss to its users. I was struck by the statement of Yahoo that goes like this “but we’re excited about the other services we have designed to help you connect with friends and family and share your activities and interests ''. It seem that they are still concerned in providing services among it's users. Keep it up. Anyway, have you heard the 529 saving plan, it is a savings fund (kind of like a 401) that gets contributed to over time, with limits on maximum donations, withdrawals and so forth. However, since many use mutual funds and other market investments, the stock market crash has crippled some of their values. State 529 plans are understood to be more valuable at this point than broker 529s. That said, a 529 saving plan for your heirs would be worth some quick cash to start – remember, one day they'll pick your nursing home!
