She taught me what the internet was. She taught me how files can be stored in the internet. She made me feel special about having my own personal homepage. She was the first with whom I joined the world of internet. Now she is gone, 🙁 She won’t be with me any more.

After serving 15 great years of free web hosting, Yahoo! shutdown its GeoCities services today. Before Twitter, before Facebook, before MySpace – heck, even before Friendster, there was a service known as GeoCities. For those who grew up on the Net in the 90s, it was about as close as you get to what we know today as social networks. It was essentially an organization of like-minded user-created homepages in different topical communities like sports, entertainment, and tech.

GeoCities was once known for pioneering the personal portal era where anyone could build up their own personal pages. GeoCities got acquired by Yahoo! for $2.87 billion in 1999. However, the service suffered badly in the last eight years or so as blogging platforms evolved and the website-creating and hosting services gradually became cheaper.

GeoCities could never cope up with rapidly changing technology and failed to update their platform. Despite that, GeoCities has been pioneers for web page building. It allowed adding picture, text, web page visit counter and guest book.

Yahoo! urges their existing GeoCities customers to move their pages to Yahoo! Web Hosting service. This web hosting service will include personal domain and other tools like email, site building, unlimited bandwidth and diskspace and more.

However the official reason is yet to be revealed.