R.I.P. Geocities

Maybe you’ve already heard by now that, But Yahoo is shutting down Geocities. Yes, the same Geocities it paid $3 billion dollars for a mere 10 years ago for.

Yahoo has shut down the Geocities website. Geocities was a free website service and online community. It was one of the hottest properties on the internet during the late 90s. Yahoo overpaid for the service in 1999, paying a whopping $4.9 BILLION for it in a stock deal.

CNET calls Geocities a "relic of Web's early days." PC World says "So Long, GeoCities: We Forgot You Still Existed."

The Geocities website now contains the following message.

After careful consideration, we have decided to close GeoCities later this year. We'll share more details this summer. For now, please sign in or visit the help center for more information.

Yahoo has also posted a faq about the closing. "Yahoo will be closing Geocities accounts by the end of the year". The faq states, "Later this year we will be closing all GeoCities accounts and web sites. We'll send you more details this summer."

It remains to be seen whether the failure of Geocities is a lesson for today's ultra hot web communities like MySpace and Facebook.

The first thing I thought about when I heard this news was MySpace.

Before you laugh out loud, I’m not talking MySpace the darling amongst teens and music artists today, I’m talking about MySpace 10 years from now. Take a ride in your time machine to the year 2019 because it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if by then MySpace has met the same grim fate. A lot of MySpace pages are nothing more than Geocities type over-busy pages with sound. The major difference is MySpace is more ‘social’ whatever that means.

There will be something cooler than MySpace within the next 10 years and the inevitable shut down will follow. That’s not to say MySpace is a complete waste of time today so don’t think I’m trolling here but I think the sobering news about Geocities being here today gone tomorrow within 10 years – a lifetime on the internet, BTW – should be a wake-up call for MySpace users.

What do you think, am I wrong? Will MySpace have more longevity than Geocities? If you need another example of a waning giant, look at eBay vs. Craigslist. It’s tough staying relevant, popular and cool online. For that matter, what about Facebook? it's not really all that hot as it was back just a few years ago is it? (I still don't get what the big deal is) or for that matter, Twitter, whats THAT all about? will we be reading about these in the cyber obituaries a decade from now? remembering back to what life was like when these "giants" were around?

Thoughts?