I remember my first blog website. It was on Geocities. Sad to hear that Yahoo! is pulling the plug. But it is more of the nostalgia that adds to my sentiment. It is finally time to lay GeoCities to rest. Yahoo! does not mention an exact date, but there are always references to the latter part of the year:

Existing GeoCities accounts have not changed. You can continue to enjoy your web site and GeoCities services until later this year. You don’t need to change a thing right now — we just wanted you to let you know about the closure as soon as possible. We’ll provide more details about closing GeoCities and how to save your site data this summer, and we will update the help center with more details at that time.[Yahoo!]

What I find rather funny is how Yahoo! pushes the “award winning Yahoo! Web Hosting Service” which is an all in one paid service as the prime option for GeoCities migration. I have nothing against this — but obviously they’re not telling the public of other perfectly good (and FREE) services such as WordPress and Blogger.

Closing geocities forms part of their strategy to streamline all their services and eliminate those that don’t seem to fit in the scheme of things (i.e the closing of JumpCut in June ’09).

Farewell, Geocities. We knew thee well.