Geocities

GeoCities was originally founded by David Bohnett and John Rezner in late 1994 as Beverly Hills Internet (BHI) and later sold to Yahoo where it became widly used.

Background
In its original form, site users selected a "city" in which to place their web pages. The "cities" were named after real cities or regions according to their content — for example, computer-related sites were placed in "SiliconValley" and those dealing with entertainment were assigned to "Hollywood" — hence the name of the site.

Ten years after Yahoo! bought GeoCities,[1] the company announced that it would shut down the United States GeoCities service on October 26, 2009, and GeoCities websites actually became unavailable the next day. There were at least 38 million user-built pages on GeoCities before it was shut down. The GeoCities Japan version of the service is still available.

Closure
On April 23, 2009, Yahoo! announced that it would be closing its United States branch of GeoCities, and stopped accepting new registrations, though the existing GeoCities accounts remained active.[3] In late June 2009, Yahoo! updated the GeoCities home page to indicate: "GeoCities is closing on October 26, 2009."[2] GeoCities joined a long list of other services discontinued by Yahoo such as: Farechase, Launchcast, My Web, Audio Search, Pets, Live, Kickstart, Briefcase and Yahoo! for Teachers.

Archiving GeoCities websites
Shortly after the GeoCities closing announcement, the Internet Archive announced a project to archive GeoCities pages, stating "GeoCities has been an important outlet for personal expression on the Web for almost 15 years." Internet Archive made it their task to ensure the thoroughness and completeness of their archive of GeoCities sites. The website InternetArchaeology.org also archived and is showcasing artifacts from GeoCities. The operators of the website ReoCities downloaded as much of the content hosted on GeoCities as they could before it shut down and intend to create a mirror of GeoCities, albeit an incomplete one.

Another site which is attempting to build an archive of defunct GeoCities web sites is GeoCities.ws. Although it is using the GeoCities name, it is not clear from the site what its relationship with the original GeoCities is. Other sites with this purpose are Geociti.es and WebCite.

Links

 * Geocities.WS
 * Geociti.es