GeoCities closes today -- farewell!

It's the end of an era in the world of the web: Yahoo!'s GeoCities service is finally shutting down today. The shutdown was originally announced in April of this year.

GeoCities was one of the early success stories of the nascent online world. Launched in 1995, its popularity quickly exploded. By 1999 it had become big enough to attract the interest of our very own corporate bosses, and Yahoo! paid over $3.5 billion for it that year, making it one of the web's most legendary acquisitions.

GeoCities let anyone build a simple website hosted by the service, for free. Over the years an endless number of quirky and, some might say, utterly useless websites, and in recent years a whole host of competing offerings have come on the market. Most notably, GeoCities was a key precursor to the blogging industry, which rose to prominence as similarly free services such as Blogger and WordPress, which also let anyone create a website about anything -- only with a little more structure than the notoriously free-form GeoCities.

As the BBC notes, at one point GeoCities was the third most popular destination on the Internet.

While GeoCities may be gone officially, it will always be remembered. In fact, GeoCities lives on  indefinitely courtesy of the Internet Archive, which has been busily archiving GeoCities-hosted sites since its closure was announced. The "historical record" of GeoCities can be found on the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, though of course that record will never be 100 percent complete.

Ah, well.... Join me and raise a glass to GeoCities as we see it off into that great digital graveyard in the sky.