404 Error: Yahoo To Close GeoCities

Yahoo is shuttering the free hosting service that, at one time, seemed to be ubiquitous on the Web.

GeoCities, the service that Yahoo purchased 10 years ago, was a free service that hosted personal Web sites. For some, GeoCities was the first Web hosting service that allowed individuals to post content to a personal Web page.

Yahoo acquired GeoCities in a stock deal for $4.6 billion in 1999, the height of the dot-com boom, Reuters reported.

But Thursday, the eulogy was short and to the point, posted on the GeoCities homepage.

"Sorry, new GeoCities accounts are no longer available. After careful consideration, we have decided to close GeoCities later this year. We'll share more details this summer."

Carol Bartz, current CEO, promised to shake things up at the company upon replacing Jerry Wang as the head of Yahoo. And shake things up she has, recently cutting staff and reducing costs, and it appears that GeoCities is the latest casualty in her strategy to focus on different opportunities for the company.

"As part of Yahoo's ongoing effort to build products and services that deliver the best possible experiences for consumers and results for advertisers, we are increasing investment in some areas while scaling back in others," Yahoo said in a statement.

Part of the decision to close the personal Web site service is likely due to the popularity of social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace.

"We have decided to discontinue the process of allowing new customers to sign up for GeoCities accounts as we focus on helping our customers explore and build new relationships online in other ways."