GeoCities was a popular web hosting platform founded in California in 1995. Originally known as BHI, it initially comprised six themed neighborhoods and offered users, referred to as ‘Homesteaders’, 2MB of free space for their home pages. GeoCities expanded to include a variety of ‘neighborhoods’ like CapitolHill and Tokyo, and by the end of 1995, it boasted 14 neighborhoods and millions of monthly page views. Notably, in 1999, Yahoo![3] acquired GeoCities for $3.57 billion in stock, marking a significant milestone in its history. However, due to changes in terms of service and other factors, GeoCities was shut down in the U.S. in October 2009. Despite its closure, GeoCities left a significant mark as it pioneered user-generated content[1] platforms, was the third-most visited site at its peak, and had at least 38 million pages before termination. Today, it is remembered for its significant role in the early days of the web and the impact it had on internet[2] culture.
GeoCities, later Yahoo! GeoCities, was a web hosting service that allowed users to create and publish websites for free and to browse user-created websites by their theme or interest, active from 1994 to 2009. GeoCities was started in November 1994 by David Bohnett and John Rezner, and was named Beverly Hills Internet briefly before being renamed GeoCities. On January 28, 1999, it was acquired by Yahoo!, at which time it was reportedly the third-most visited website on the World Wide Web.
Tipo de sítio | Serviço de alojamento Web |
---|---|
Proprietário |
|
Created by | David Bohnett and John Rezner |
Comercial | Sim |
Registo | Sim |
Lançado | November 1994 |
Situação atual | Inactive since 2009 (Japanese version inactive since 2019) |
In its original form, site users selected a "city" in which to list the hyperlinks to their Web pages. The "cities" were named after real cities or regions according to their content: For example, computador-related sites were placed in "SiliconValley" and those dealing with entretenimento were assigned to "Hollywood", hence the name of the site. Soon after its acquisition by Yahoo!, this practice was abandoned in favor of using the Yahoo! member names in the URLs.
In April 2009, the company announced that it would end the United States GeoCities service on October 26, 2009.
There were at least 38 million pages displayed by GeoCities before it was terminated, most user-written. The GeoCities Japan version of the service endured until March 31, 2019.