Geocities is closing. Oh!

It was in the IT news this week. Troubled Y! has sighted Geocities as one of the services to be dropped in the ongoing rationalization exercise.
Many of us who ever coded a page a little while ago (that's to say more than 10 years) likely used Geocities.

Geocities was supposed to make money from ads that would appear on these free website. There was also possibility of getting rid of ads by upgrading. (With my blog--successor of Geocities-like web presence--instead of lugging provider ads, I place my own Adsense links).

I wouldn't be surprised if the younger generation has never heard of Geocities. Now with a myriad of social networking web services such as Facebook, Myspace and blogs, life is easy for page owners, plus, it's quite easy to link to friends etc, share stuff while having fun. Emergence of these web 2.0 services rang the death knell of stiff-upper-lip services that couldn't conform with changing times. Freeservers and Tripod are likely to be next.

The one hosting service that offers free registration that seem almost too good to be true, Awardspace, got me hooked and am now owning a paid hosting that offers hundredfold more for a song. Now this is nice and proper. With it comes database, PHP, server-side installers of a handful of utilities (Zacky tools installer) etc.

I'll say bye to Geocities, it did us lot of good while it lasted. I'm still having my older sites on Geocities such as my resource page. Time I moved them elsewhere, I guess.