Yahoo Japan is shutting down the last remnants of GeoCities
The website-hosting platform and all its content is going bye-bye in March.
Yahoo Japan, the last enclave of GeoCities, is scrapping the beloved website-hosting service. In March 2019 -- 22 years after its original launch -- GeoCities will be extinct, according to Quartz. Yahoo, which bought the platform in 1999 for $3.57 billion in stock, announced the closure on its Japanese website, citing profitability and technological issues. As a result, Yahoo "regrets" that all the GeoCities content -- compartmentalized into "neighborhoods", as is the norm -- will be wiped from the web along with it.
That means you've only got a few months left to relive GeoCities' lurid, DIY aesthetic before it vanishes into the ether. The fact that Japan still played host to the service is a testament to Yahoo's enduring success in the country, in part due to its localized services.
Still it's not all doom and gloom. Since GeoCities' demise it has been transformed into a massive city visualization with street-like grids as part of "The Deleted City" project. Meanwhile, archival efforts to preserve the '90s mainstay have included the Internet Archive's GeoCities Special Collection via the Wayback Machine and separate projects like ReoCities, OoCitie, and GEOCITIES.ws.
