In 1995, as the Internet started gaining popularity, GeoCities 
was founded in an effort to give those burgeoning masses their own Web space for free. Sure, in the beginning, you had to have some HTML
knowledge, but over time, they brought out their Site Builder, and even that wasn’t necessary.
For those of us who had a site (or several) on GeoCities, October 26, 2009 may mark a sad day in our lives, and Yahoo, who purchased GeoCities for an obscene sum of money 10 years ago, finally shut the doors for good.
However, outside of those that used GeoCities, would anyone else have noticed, even cared, for that matter?
In the end, while GeoCities proved to be one of the pioneers of building an online community and a way for people to build their presence on the Internet, the blunt truth is that social media, starting with blogs and working down to sites such as Twitter and MySpace, killed the community at GeoCities long ago.
Many of those, who, in the late 1990s, would have flocked to a free site builder such as GeoCities and its competitors have now built their free online posts at blog sites like WordPress.com and Blogger.com. And better still was the fact that the site-building tools available at most social media sites far outstripped GeoCities even in its most useful versions.
For Yahoo’s part, it was pretty clear, even as early as 2001, that they had just threw away the money they used for the GeoCities purchase. Rather than augment it, Yahoo opted to let it fester. To be fair, they did let GeoCities live longer than its other social media failure, Yahoo360, which they shutter in July 2009.
Even though social media has blunted the GeoCities closure so many would barely notice its ultimate thud, the do-it-yourself Web builders out there are not want of free Web space. There are still plenty of sites out there, most notably Homestead, Bravenet and webs.com.
Finally, for those of you who would still like to find old GeoCities content, the Internet Archive and, most recently, ReoCities, have a great deal of old pages stored for your viewing enjoyment.
