Seo, Make Money Online and Technology

When Geocities’ parent company Yahoo closes the service down today (26th October) all websites held there will be deleted. GeoCities, once the Internet’s third most visited domain, removed taking with it thousands of user home pages and decades of data. All that information will be history…. Fortunately, some historians are making sure it’s not lost to the annals of time.

GeoCities was a web hosting service founded by David Bohnett and John Rezner in late 1994. The company created its own Web directory, organized thematically in six “neighborhoods”. The neighborhood included “Colosseum,” “Hollywood,” “RodeoDrive,” “SunsetStrip,” “WallStreet,” and “WestHollywood”. In mid-1995, the company decided to offer users (thereafter known as “Homesteaders”) the ability to develop free home pages within those neighborhoods. Chat, bulletin boards, and other elements of “community” were added soon after, helping foster rapid growth.

In January 1999, near the peak of the dot-com bubble, Geocities was purchased by Yahoo! for $3.57 billion in stock, with Yahoo! taking control on May 28. The acquisition proved extremely unpopular; users began protest at the new terms of service put out by Yahoo! for GeoCities. The domain geocities.com attracted at least 177 million visitors annually by 2008 according to a Compete.com study. ComScore stated that the Geocities had 18.9 million unique visitors from the U.S. in March 2006. In March 2008 Geocities had 15.1 million unique U.S. visitors. In March 2009 Geocities had 11.5 million unique visitors, a 24% decline from March 2008.

With Tripod as a rival service, the cheapest and easiest way to set up a website was with Geocities In the late 90s. It revolutionized web publishing; transforming it from the preserve of a few geeks to something anyone could do.
Some people argue that Yahoo should buy Ning, The Geocities 2.0…. Are you agree with that ?