Social networks turn Geo Cities into ghost town

Regular readers of this column will know the writer has a soft spot for Yahoo!.

The first free email address was one from Yahoo and it still works 12 years on, although the format of mail.yahoo has changed slightly.

Yahoo has really improved its mail service and now, even if you register as a New Zealand resident, you can have a .com address but still pick up New Zealand news feeds.

But that is digressing.

Back in 1999, at the very peak of the dot.com boom, Yahoo bought GeoCities for $NZ5.2 billion - a not unsubstantial figure even then.

GeoCities once boasted millions of users and was the third most popular destination on the web as people got their first taste of building and owning a web page.

Sorry to say readers but the switch to social networks has caused the demise of GeoCities, which closed on Labour Day.

However, many of the pages have been archived and will still be available to view through the non-profit Internet Archive project.

This writer's first humble attempts of writing in a computer language were on GeoCities following the purchase of a book which, although not a dummies guide, was a practical lesson in HTML.

An online statement from the Internet Archive said it had collected a lot of GeoCities sites over the years but did not have every site and every page.

I earnestly hope my GeoCities site has disappeared, although I did have more hair and less weight rather when compared with the current situation.

The Internet Archive was busy asking for GeoCities users to check whether their site had been archived before Yahoo stopped service.

"GeoCities has been an important outlet for personal expression for the web for almost 15 years," it said.

GeoCities started life in 1995 as Beverley Hills Internet, a small web-hosting firm.

The company allowed users to host their web pages in themed cities.

For example, "Wall Street" hosted business-related sites while "Silicon Valley" was used to host computer and technology sites.

Users, known as homesteaders, could build and host their own sites in those online spaces.

In April this year, Yahoo said it was closing the site and would now focus on helping "customers build new relationships online" - whatever that means.

When Yahoo announced the end of the site, Rupert Goodwins, editor of the ZDNet website, said it was the end of an era.

"I think GeoCities was the first proof that you could have something really popular and still not make any money on the internet.

"It was a fascinating experiment in the pre-industrial era of the internet," he said.

Separately, Yahoo and Microsoft have extended the deadline to seal an agreement on their internet search and advertising partnership.

In a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Yahoo said the two companies had mutually agreed to continue their negotiations beyond the original date set to reach a definitive agreement.

Yahoo and Microsoft had originally planned to complete their agreement by October 27, but in the SEC filing, Yahoo said: "Given the complex nature of the transaction, there remain some details to be finalised".

"The parties are working diligently on finalising the agreements, have made good progress to date, and have agreed to execute the agreements as expeditiously as possible," Yahoo said.

The 10-year web search and advertising partnership unveiled in July sets the stage for a joint Yahoo-Microsoft offensive against internet titan Google, the dominant leader in the lucrative search and advertising market.

Under the no-cash deal, Yahoo will use Microsoft's new Bing search engine on its own sites, while Yahoo will provide the exclusive global sales force for premium search advertisers.

The agreement between the internet portal and software giant, which will be subject to review by US anti-trust regulators, is expected to close in early 2010.