Yahoo! on Monday closed GeoCities, a free Web hosting service that it purchased for over three billion dollars at the height of the dot-com boom.
"We have enjoyed hosting websites created by Yahoo! users all over the world, and we're proud of the community you've built," the California-based Internet pioneer said in a message at the GeoCities website.
"However, we have decided to focus on helping our customers explore and build relationships online in other ways."
Yahoo! said GeoCities would not be available after Monday and recommended GeoCities refugees set up new online homes at its paid Web hosting service, with an introductory offer of just five dollars for the first 12 months.
The closure of GeoCities comes a week after Yahoo! reported that aggressive cost-cutting helped it more than triple its net profit despite a 12-percent decline in revenue in its third quarter.
Yahoo! said net profit soared more than 244 percent in the quarter to 186 million dollars, or 13 cents per share, from 54 million dollars, or four cents per share, a year ago, easily surpassing analysts' forecasts.
The better-than-expected performance was due in large part to cost-cutting measures implemented by Carol Bartz since being named in January to replace Yahoo! co-founder Jerry Yang as chief executive.
Yahoo! has reduced its headcount by some 2,000 during the past year and presently has some 13,200 employees.
Yahoo! announced the planned closure of GeoCities early this year, saying it was "increasing investment in some areas while scaling back in others."
GeoCities was founded in 1994 as Beverly Hills Internet and bought by Yahoo! during the infamous dot-com boom in Silicon Valley.
GeoCities provided people with tools to build interactive websites and eventually added chat forums and other community-oriented features.
Yahoo! eventually added fee-paying premium services in an effort to make money at GeoCities, which had trouble retaining users and getting profitable.
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Yahoo-owned GeoCities closes down
Saturday, September 5, 2009
Yahoo launches a Twitter lookalike!
Yahoo, which is otherwise not doing very well in the tech market, has finally taken the first step towards improving its situation.
YahooThe giant has directly challenged the current favourite of netizens - Twitter and launched a microblogging platform called Yahoo Meme. Yahoo had previously launched a Portuguese language micro-blogging product, Yahoo Meme, which was obviously similar to Twitter and Tumblr.
It looks like Yahoo definitely has lofty ambitions for Yahoo Meme, as it has stealthily rolled the micro-blogging service out in Spanish and now in English to appeal to the masses. Yahoo Meme exactly works like Twitter.
Let's see if Meme does any good to Yahoo's image.
Sunday, June 7, 2009
How to link FB to Gmail And Yahoo!?
If you are a user of Facebook and also have an account on Google (e.g. Gmail) or Yahoo!, there’s good news for you. You can now link your Google account as well as your Yahoo! ID with Facebook. The advantage is that if you are signed into any of these services, you’ll automatically be logged into your Facebook account as well.
How it works
For example, if you are writing an email in Gmail or working on a spreadsheet in Google Docs, you can open the Facebook website in another browser tab and it won’t show you the sign-in screen anymore as it can use the login information from the Google Account where you are already logged in.
To set up this association between Facebook and your Yahoo!/Google accounts, just open the Facebook site and go to Settings > Accounts Settings. Now click the “Add a new linked account” in the drop-down and link all your accounts one by one.
You can link Google, Yahoo!, MySpace and OpenID with your Facebook account.
