Yahoo Shutting Down GeoCities

Ten Years Later and After Wasting Over Three Billion, Yahoo! Decides to Pull The Plug on One of The Largest Living Archives of The Internet

Yahoo! announced earlier this year that they were closing GeoCities down (#1, #2, #3, #4). I was reminded of this fact, yet again, after receiving a reminder email from them today, letting me know, once again, of the planned death in store for the one of the most profound and original areas of the Internet, called GeoCities.

Strangely, this event won’t shed too much emotion, as the era of GeoCities lives within only a small percentage of users online today. Many people simply won’t understand the detrimental effect of having GeoCities wiped out and closed down. Consider this. What would life be like if all of our history books were burned and destroyed?

The virtual world we once called the “Information Superhighway” is about to have one of the original roads destroyed and removed from the map! So what exactly is going to happen to GeoCities? Yahoo, provides this answer:

“If you do not download your files and images before October 26, 2009, you will no longer be able to access that data. After October 26, your GeoCities files will be deleted from our servers, and will not be recoverable.”

- http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/geocities/close/close-03.html

I can understand Yahoo!’s decision on closing GeoCities and preventing new accounts from being created. But, what I can’t understand is why Yahoo! will be deleting the data from their servers.  If Alexa.com can support WayBack Machine, then how come Yahoo! or another company can’t step forward and preserve one of the largest sections of the early Internet era? As it stands, there is a group that is currently trying to do that.

Here is a copy of the email I received from Yahoo!:

I hope that GeoCities can be preserved in some way. Even though the Internet has evolved into social networks and blogs, every once in awhile when I do a search in Google, I find the information I am looking for on an old GeoCities page. I can’t begin to calculate the combined endless amount of hours it took for the community of only ten years ago to build this virtual world. Unfortunately, I can calculate how long it would take to erase it. With that said, I will be very sad to see GeoCities go, and any and all remaining respect and trust I have in Yahoo! will soon disappear with it.

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