GeoCities
Encyclopedia
Yahoo! GeoCities is a web hosting service
, currently available only in Japan
.
GeoCities was originally founded by David Bohnett
and John Rezner in late 1994 as Beverly Hills Internet (BHI). In its original form, site users selected a "city" in which to place their web page
s. The "cities" were named after real cities or regions according to their content — for example, computer
-related sites were placed in "SiliconValley" and those dealing with entertainment
were assigned to "Hollywood" — hence the name of the site.
Ten years after Yahoo!
bought GeoCities, the company announced that it would shut down the United States GeoCities service on October 26, 2009, and GeoCities websites actually became unavailable the next day. There were at least 38 million user-built pages on GeoCities before it was shut down. The GeoCities Japan version of the service is still available.
Geocities remains one of the most popular websites two years after it was shut down by Yahoo!, ranking among the top four thousand websites in the world.
GeoCities began in mid-1995 as BHI, which stood for Beverly Hills Internet, a small Web hosting and development company in Southern California.
The company created its own Web directory, organized thematically in six "neighborhoods". The neighborhoods included "Colosseum," "Hollywood," "RodeoDrive," "SunsetStrip," "WallStreet," and "WestHollywood". In mid-1995, the company decided to offer users (thereafter known as "Homesteaders") the ability to develop free home pages within those neighborhoods. During the sign-up process, new members chose to which neighborhood they wanted to belong. This neighborhood became part of the member's web address along with a sequentially assigned "street address" number to make the URL unique (for example,"www.geocities.com/RodeoDrive/number" ). Chat, bulletin boards, and other elements of "community" were added soon after, helping foster rapid growth. On July 5, 1995 Geocities added additional cities, including "CapitolHill," "Paris," "SiliconValley," and "Tokyo." By December 1995, the company, which now had a total of 14 neighborhoods, was signing up thousands of Homesteaders a day and getting over six million monthly page views. GeoCities never enforced neighborhood specific content; for example, a "Hollywood" homesteader could be nothing but a college student's home page, which would be more appropriate for another neighborhood. The company decided to focus on building membership and community, and on December 15, 1995, BHI became known as GeoCities after having also been called Geopages. At that point GeoCities was headquartered at 9401 Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills. By December 1996 it was headquartered on the third floor of 1918 Main Street in Santa Monica
, with an office on the 8th floor of 125 Park Avenue in Manhattan
, New York City
.
Over time, many companies, including Yahoo!
, invested extensively in GeoCities and, with the introduction of paid premium services, the site continued to grow. In May 1997, GeoCities introduced advertisements
on its pages. Despite negative reaction from users, GeoCities continued to grow. By June 1997, GeoCities was the fifth most popular site on the Web, and by October of that year the company had signed up its millionth Homesteader.
In June 1998, in an effort to increase brand awareness, GeoCities introduced a watermark
to user web pages. The watermark, much like an onscreen graphic
on some television channels, was a transparent floating GIF
which used JavaScript to stay on the bottom right side of the browser screen. Many users felt the watermark interfered with the design of their website and threatened to move their web pages elsewhere. The watermark also had cross-browser issues. GeoCities claimed in a press release that the company had received upbeat feedback regarding the watermark.
The company went public in August 1998, listing on the NASDAQ
exchange with the code GCTY. The IPO
price was $17, rising rapidly after launch to a peak of over $100. By 1999 GeoCities was the third-most visited website on the World Wide Web, behind AOL
and Yahoo!
. The headquarters had moved to 4499 Glencoe Avenue in Los Angeles, near the Marina del Rey area of Los Angeles County.
In January 1999, near the peak of the dot-com bubble
, GeoCities was purchased by Yahoo! for $3.57 billion in stock, with Yahoo! taking control on May 28. The acquisition proved extremely unpopular; users began to leave en masse in protest at the new terms of service
put out by Yahoo! for GeoCities. The terms stated that the company owned all rights and content, including media such as pictures. Yahoo! quickly reversed its decision. In July 1999, Yahoo! switched from neighborhoods and street address URL
s for homesteaders to "vanity" URLs through members' sign-up names to Yahoo! ("www.geocities.com/membername" ). However, members who signed up prior to the abandonment of neighborhoods retained their old address in addition to the new username-based one until the day of GeoCities' closure. Soon after the change to a username-based system, a lawsuit was filed against Yahoo! by its volunteer group of community managers, so GeoCities' volunteer program (Community Leaders) was terminated.
In 2001, amidst speculation by analysts that GeoCities was not yet profitable (it having declared an $8 million loss for the final quarter of 1998), Yahoo! introduced a for-fee premium hosting service at GeoCities and reduced the accessibility of free and low-price hosting accounts by limiting their data transfer rate for webpage visitors; since that time the data transfer limit for free accounts was said to be limited to 3 GB per month, but was enforced as a limit of about 4.2 MB per hour. The paid accounts were later unified in the Yahoo! Web Hosting service, with higher data transfer limits. During 2001, a rumor began that GeoCities was to close; the chain e-mail making that claim cited a The New York Times
article that stated the opposite.
branch of GeoCities, and stopped accepting new registrations, though the existing GeoCities accounts remained active. In late June 2009, Yahoo! updated the GeoCities home page to indicate: "GeoCities is closing on October 26, 2009." On that day, files on GeoCities servers became inaccessible. GeoCities joined a long list of other services discontinued by Yahoo, such as Farechase, Launchcast, My Web, Audio Search, Pets, Live, Kickstart, Briefcase, and Yahoo! for Teachers.
With the closure of GeoCities in the U.S., Yahoo! no longer offers free webpage hosting except in Japan
. Yahoo! encouraged users to upgrade their accounts to the fee-based Yahoo! Web Hosting service.
Rupert Goodwins, the editor of ZDNet
, perceived the closure of GeoCities as an end of an era; he described GeoCities as "the first proof that you could have something really popular and still not make any money on the internet." Vijay Mukhi, an internet and cyber security expert quoted in the Business Standard
, criticized Yahoo's handling of GeoCities; Mukhi described GeoCities as "a lost opportunity for Yahoo! They could have made it a Facebook
if they wanted." Rich Skrenta
, the CEO of Blekko
, posted on Twitter
an offer to take over GeoCities from Yahoo! in exchange for 50% future revenue share.
In response to the closure, rival webhosting services began to compete for the web sites leaving GeoCities. For instance, German
web host Jimdo
started the "Lifeboat for GeoCities" service to encourage GeoCities users to put their websites on Jimdo. Geocities-closing.com, started by GeoCities competitor uCoz
, is a similar project launched to save GeoCities websites.
announced a project to archive GeoCities pages, stating "GeoCities has been an important outlet for personal expression on the Web for almost 15 years." Internet Archive made it their task to ensure the thoroughness and completeness of their archive of GeoCities sites. The website InternetArchaeology.org also archived and is showcasing artifacts from GeoCities. The operators of the website ReoCities downloaded as much of the content hosted on GeoCities as they could before it shut down and intend to create a mirror of GeoCities, albeit an incomplete one.
Another site which is attempting to build an archive of defunct GeoCities web sites is GeoCities.ws. Although it is using the GeoCities name, it is not clear from the site what its relationship with the original GeoCities is. Other sites with this purpose are Geociti.es and WebCite
.
On the first anniversary of Geocities closing, The Archive Team released a torrent file
archive of 641 GB (prior to 7zip compression, it was approximately 900 GB of data).
On April 16, 2011, The Archive Team released a patch for the first Geocities torrent (originally released on October 29, 2010)
study.
ComScore stated that the Geocities had 18.9 million unique visitors from the U.S. in March 2006. In March 2008 Geocities had 15.1 million unique U.S. visitors. In March 2009 Geocities had 11.5 million unique visitors, a 24% decline from March 2008.
under 14 USC §45, which states in relevant part, "Unfair methods of competition in or affecting commerce, and unfair or deceptive acts or practices in or affecting commerce, are hereby declared unlawful." The FTC found that GeoCities was engaged in deceptive acts and practices in contravention to their stated privacy act. Subsequently, a consent order was entered into which prohibits GeoCities from misrepresenting the purpose for which it collects and/or uses personal identifying information from consumers. A copy of the complaint and order can be found at 127 F.T.C. 94 (page 94).
The litigation came about in this way: GeoCities provided free home pages and e-mail address to children and adults who provided personally identifying and demographic information when they registered for the website. At the time of the complaint, GeoCities had more than 1.8 million members who were "homesteaders." GeoCities illegally permitted third-party advertisers to promote products targeted to GeoCities' 1.8 million users, by using personally identifiable information obtained in the registration process. These acts and practices affected "commerce" as defined in Section 4 of the Federal Trade Commission.
The problem GeoCities faced was that it placed a privacy statement on its New Member Application Form and on its website promising that it would never give personally identifying information to anyone without the user's permission. GeoCities sold personal information to third parties who used the information for purposes other than those for which members gave permission.
It was ordered that GeoCities would not make any misrepresentation, in any manner about its collection or use of personal identifying information, including what information will be disclosed to third parties. GeoCities was not allowed to collect personal identifying information from any child if GeoCities had actual knowledge that the child did not have his parents' permission to provide the information.
, GeoCities had a Japanese subsidiary, GeoCities Japan. GeoCities Japan was headquartered in the Nihonbashi Hakozaki Building in the Nihonbashi
area of Chūō
, Tokyo
.
As of November 3, 2011, GeoCities Japan is still online, with no signs of upcoming closure. Its member sites are still accessible, and it is still accepting new account registrations, but now all services are only available in Japanese
.
– Finance and business – Dining – Outdoor sports and health – Computers and the internet – Travel – Science and high technology – Education and student life – Family and pets – Films and performing arts – Video games – Pop, rock music, and concerts – Fashion, design, and shopping – Dating – Automobiles and motorcycles
Web hosting service
A web hosting service is a type of Internet hosting service that allows individuals and organizations to make their own website accessible via the World Wide Web. Web hosts are companies that provide space on a server they own or lease for use by their clients as well as providing Internet...
, currently available only in Japan
Japan
Japan is an island nation in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south...
.
GeoCities was originally founded by David Bohnett
David Bohnett
David C. Bohnett is an American philanthropist and technology entrepreneur.-Life and career:Bohnett was born in Chicago, Illinois...
and John Rezner in late 1994 as Beverly Hills Internet (BHI). In its original form, site users selected a "city" in which to place their web page
Web page
A web page or webpage is a document or information resource that is suitable for the World Wide Web and can be accessed through a web browser and displayed on a monitor or mobile device. This information is usually in HTML or XHTML format, and may provide navigation to other web pages via hypertext...
s. The "cities" were named after real cities or regions according to their content — for example, computer
Computer
A computer is a programmable machine designed to sequentially and automatically carry out a sequence of arithmetic or logical operations. The particular sequence of operations can be changed readily, allowing the computer to solve more than one kind of problem...
-related sites were placed in "SiliconValley" and those dealing with entertainment
Entertainment
Entertainment consists of any activity which provides a diversion or permits people to amuse themselves in their leisure time. Entertainment is generally passive, such as watching opera or a movie. Active forms of amusement, such as sports, are more often considered to be recreation...
were assigned to "Hollywood" — hence the name of the site.
Ten years after Yahoo!
Yahoo!
Yahoo! Inc. is an American multinational internet corporation headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, United States. The company is perhaps best known for its web portal, search engine , Yahoo! Directory, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Groups, Yahoo! Answers, advertising, online mapping ,...
bought GeoCities, the company announced that it would shut down the United States GeoCities service on October 26, 2009, and GeoCities websites actually became unavailable the next day. There were at least 38 million user-built pages on GeoCities before it was shut down. The GeoCities Japan version of the service is still available.
Geocities remains one of the most popular websites two years after it was shut down by Yahoo!, ranking among the top four thousand websites in the world.
History
The company created its own Web directory, organized thematically in six "neighborhoods". The neighborhoods included "Colosseum," "Hollywood," "RodeoDrive," "SunsetStrip," "WallStreet," and "WestHollywood". In mid-1995, the company decided to offer users (thereafter known as "Homesteaders") the ability to develop free home pages within those neighborhoods. During the sign-up process, new members chose to which neighborhood they wanted to belong. This neighborhood became part of the member's web address along with a sequentially assigned "street address" number to make the URL unique (for example,
Santa Monica, California
Santa Monica is a beachfront city in western Los Angeles County, California, US. Situated on Santa Monica Bay, it is surrounded on three sides by the city of Los Angeles — Pacific Palisades on the northwest, Brentwood on the north, West Los Angeles on the northeast, Mar Vista on the east, and...
, with an office on the 8th floor of 125 Park Avenue in Manhattan
Manhattan
Manhattan is the oldest and the most densely populated of the five boroughs of New York City. Located primarily on the island of Manhattan at the mouth of the Hudson River, the boundaries of the borough are identical to those of New York County, an original county of the state of New York...
, New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
.
Yahoo!
Yahoo! Inc. is an American multinational internet corporation headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, United States. The company is perhaps best known for its web portal, search engine , Yahoo! Directory, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Groups, Yahoo! Answers, advertising, online mapping ,...
, invested extensively in GeoCities and, with the introduction of paid premium services, the site continued to grow. In May 1997, GeoCities introduced advertisements
Advertising
Advertising is a form of communication used to persuade an audience to take some action with respect to products, ideas, or services. Most commonly, the desired result is to drive consumer behavior with respect to a commercial offering, although political and ideological advertising is also common...
on its pages. Despite negative reaction from users, GeoCities continued to grow. By June 1997, GeoCities was the fifth most popular site on the Web, and by October of that year the company had signed up its millionth Homesteader.
In June 1998, in an effort to increase brand awareness, GeoCities introduced a watermark
Watermark
A watermark is a recognizable image or pattern in paper that appears as various shades of lightness/darkness when viewed by transmitted light , caused by thickness or density variations in the paper...
to user web pages. The watermark, much like an onscreen graphic
Digital on-screen graphic
A digital on-screen graphic is a watermark-like station logo that many television broadcasters overlay over a portion of the screen-area of their programs to identify the channel...
on some television channels, was a transparent floating GIF
GIF
The Graphics Interchange Format is a bitmap image format that was introduced by CompuServe in 1987 and has since come into widespread usage on the World Wide Web due to its wide support and portability....
which used JavaScript to stay on the bottom right side of the browser screen. Many users felt the watermark interfered with the design of their website and threatened to move their web pages elsewhere. The watermark also had cross-browser issues. GeoCities claimed in a press release that the company had received upbeat feedback regarding the watermark.
The company went public in August 1998, listing on the NASDAQ
NASDAQ
The NASDAQ Stock Market, also known as the NASDAQ, is an American stock exchange. "NASDAQ" originally stood for "National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations". It is the second-largest stock exchange by market capitalization in the world, after the New York Stock Exchange. As of...
exchange with the code GCTY. The IPO
Initial public offering
An initial public offering or stock market launch, is the first sale of stock by a private company to the public. It can be used by either small or large companies to raise expansion capital and become publicly traded enterprises...
price was $17, rising rapidly after launch to a peak of over $100. By 1999 GeoCities was the third-most visited website on the World Wide Web, behind AOL
AOL
AOL Inc. is an American global Internet services and media company. AOL is headquartered at 770 Broadway in New York. Founded in 1983 as Control Video Corporation, it has franchised its services to companies in several nations around the world or set up international versions of its services...
and Yahoo!
Yahoo!
Yahoo! Inc. is an American multinational internet corporation headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, United States. The company is perhaps best known for its web portal, search engine , Yahoo! Directory, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Groups, Yahoo! Answers, advertising, online mapping ,...
. The headquarters had moved to 4499 Glencoe Avenue in Los Angeles, near the Marina del Rey area of Los Angeles County.
Acquisition by Yahoo!
Dot-com bubble
The dot-com bubble was a speculative bubble covering roughly 1995–2000 during which stock markets in industrialized nations saw their equity value rise rapidly from growth in the more...
, GeoCities was purchased by Yahoo! for $3.57 billion in stock, with Yahoo! taking control on May 28. The acquisition proved extremely unpopular; users began to leave en masse in protest at the new terms of service
Terms of service
Terms of service are rules which one must agree to abide by in order to use a service. Unless in violation of consumer protection laws, such terms are usually legally binding...
put out by Yahoo! for GeoCities. The terms stated that the company owned all rights and content, including media such as pictures. Yahoo! quickly reversed its decision. In July 1999, Yahoo! switched from neighborhoods and street address URL
Uniform Resource Locator
In computing, a uniform resource locator or universal resource locator is a specific character string that constitutes a reference to an Internet resource....
s for homesteaders to "vanity" URLs through members' sign-up names to Yahoo! (
In 2001, amidst speculation by analysts that GeoCities was not yet profitable (it having declared an $8 million loss for the final quarter of 1998), Yahoo! introduced a for-fee premium hosting service at GeoCities and reduced the accessibility of free and low-price hosting accounts by limiting their data transfer rate for webpage visitors; since that time the data transfer limit for free accounts was said to be limited to 3 GB per month, but was enforced as a limit of about 4.2 MB per hour. The paid accounts were later unified in the Yahoo! Web Hosting service, with higher data transfer limits. During 2001, a rumor began that GeoCities was to close; the chain e-mail making that claim cited a The New York Times
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
article that stated the opposite.
Closure
On April 23, 2009, Yahoo! announced that it would be closing its United StatesUnited States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
branch of GeoCities, and stopped accepting new registrations, though the existing GeoCities accounts remained active. In late June 2009, Yahoo! updated the GeoCities home page to indicate: "GeoCities is closing on October 26, 2009." On that day, files on GeoCities servers became inaccessible. GeoCities joined a long list of other services discontinued by Yahoo, such as Farechase, Launchcast, My Web, Audio Search, Pets, Live, Kickstart, Briefcase, and Yahoo! for Teachers.
With the closure of GeoCities in the U.S., Yahoo! no longer offers free webpage hosting except in Japan
Japan
Japan is an island nation in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south...
. Yahoo! encouraged users to upgrade their accounts to the fee-based Yahoo! Web Hosting service.
Rupert Goodwins, the editor of ZDNet
ZDNet
ZDNet is a business technology news website published by CBS Interactive, along with TechRepublic and SmartPlanet. The brand was founded on April 1, 1991 as a general interest technology portal from Ziff Davis and evolved into an enterprise IT-focused online publication owned by CNET...
, perceived the closure of GeoCities as an end of an era; he described GeoCities as "the first proof that you could have something really popular and still not make any money on the internet." Vijay Mukhi, an internet and cyber security expert quoted in the Business Standard
Business Standard
Business Standard is an Indian English-language daily newspaper published by Business Standard Ltd in two languages, English and Hindi...
, criticized Yahoo's handling of GeoCities; Mukhi described GeoCities as "a lost opportunity for Yahoo! They could have made it a Facebook
Facebook
Facebook is a social networking service and website launched in February 2004, operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. , Facebook has more than 800 million active users. Users must register before using the site, after which they may create a personal profile, add other users as...
if they wanted." Rich Skrenta
Rich Skrenta
Richard "Rich" Skrenta is a computer programmer and Silicon Valley entrepreneur who created the search engine blekko....
, the CEO of Blekko
Blekko
Blekko is a web search engine whose goal is to provide better search results than those offered by Google Search, by offering results culled from a set of 3 billion trusted websites and excluding material from such sites as content farms...
, posted on Twitter
Twitter
Twitter is an online social networking and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read text-based posts of up to 140 characters, informally known as "tweets".Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey and launched that July...
an offer to take over GeoCities from Yahoo! in exchange for 50% future revenue share.
In response to the closure, rival webhosting services began to compete for the web sites leaving GeoCities. For instance, German
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
web host Jimdo
Jimdo
Jimdo is a WYSIWYG web hosting service. Jimdo offers JimdoFree, a free web hosting service, JimdoPro and JimdoBusiness, both premium services. Jimdo is operated by Jimdo GmbH, a Hamburg, Germany-based company...
started the "Lifeboat for GeoCities" service to encourage GeoCities users to put their websites on Jimdo. Geocities-closing.com, started by GeoCities competitor uCoz
UCoz
uCoz is a free web hosting with built-in content management system. The modules of uCoz CMS can be used together to build a fully featured website, or separately, e.g. as a blog platform, webforum etc. As of July 10, 2010, there are more than one million websites created in uCoz systems...
, is a similar project launched to save GeoCities websites.
Archiving GeoCities websites
Shortly after the GeoCities closing announcement, the Internet ArchiveInternet Archive
The Internet Archive is a non-profit digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It offers permanent storage and access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, music, moving images, and nearly 3 million public domain books. The Internet Archive...
announced a project to archive GeoCities pages, stating "GeoCities has been an important outlet for personal expression on the Web for almost 15 years." Internet Archive made it their task to ensure the thoroughness and completeness of their archive of GeoCities sites. The website InternetArchaeology.org also archived and is showcasing artifacts from GeoCities. The operators of the website ReoCities downloaded as much of the content hosted on GeoCities as they could before it shut down and intend to create a mirror of GeoCities, albeit an incomplete one.
Another site which is attempting to build an archive of defunct GeoCities web sites is GeoCities.ws. Although it is using the GeoCities name, it is not clear from the site what its relationship with the original GeoCities is. Other sites with this purpose are Geociti.es and WebCite
WebCite
WebCite is a service that archives web pages on demand. Authors can subsequently cite the archived web pages through WebCite, in addition to citing the original URL of the web page. Readers are able to retrieve the archived web pages indefinitely, without regard to whether the original web page is...
.
On the first anniversary of Geocities closing, The Archive Team released a torrent file
Torrent file
A torrent file stores metadata used for BitTorrent. It is defined in the BitTorrent specification.Simply, a torrent is data about a target file, though it contains no information about the content of the file. The only data that the torrent holds is information about the location of different...
archive of 641 GB (prior to 7zip compression, it was approximately 900 GB of data).
On April 16, 2011, The Archive Team released a patch for the first Geocities torrent (originally released on October 29, 2010)
Selected traffic statistics
The domain geocities.com attracted at least 177 million visitors annually by 2008 according to a Compete.comCompete.com
Compete.com is a web traffic analysis service of Compete, Inc. which operates in the United States and publishes the approximate number of global visitors to the top 1,000,000 web sites in the world...
study.
ComScore stated that the Geocities had 18.9 million unique visitors from the U.S. in March 2006. In March 2008 Geocities had 15.1 million unique U.S. visitors. In March 2009 Geocities had 11.5 million unique visitors, a 24% decline from March 2008.
Litigation
In 1999, a complaint was instituted against GeoCities stating that the corporation violated the provisions of the Federal Trade Commission ActFederal Trade Commission Act
The Federal Trade Commission Act of 1914 started the Federal Trade Commission , a bipartisan body of five members appointed by the president of the United States for seven-year terms. This commission was authorized to issue “cease and desist” orders to large corporations to curb unfair trade...
under 14 USC §45, which states in relevant part, "Unfair methods of competition in or affecting commerce, and unfair or deceptive acts or practices in or affecting commerce, are hereby declared unlawful." The FTC found that GeoCities was engaged in deceptive acts and practices in contravention to their stated privacy act. Subsequently, a consent order was entered into which prohibits GeoCities from misrepresenting the purpose for which it collects and/or uses personal identifying information from consumers. A copy of the complaint and order can be found at 127 F.T.C. 94 (page 94).
The litigation came about in this way: GeoCities provided free home pages and e-mail address to children and adults who provided personally identifying and demographic information when they registered for the website. At the time of the complaint, GeoCities had more than 1.8 million members who were "homesteaders." GeoCities illegally permitted third-party advertisers to promote products targeted to GeoCities' 1.8 million users, by using personally identifiable information obtained in the registration process. These acts and practices affected "commerce" as defined in Section 4 of the Federal Trade Commission.
The problem GeoCities faced was that it placed a privacy statement on its New Member Application Form and on its website promising that it would never give personally identifying information to anyone without the user's permission. GeoCities sold personal information to third parties who used the information for purposes other than those for which members gave permission.
It was ordered that GeoCities would not make any misrepresentation, in any manner about its collection or use of personal identifying information, including what information will be disclosed to third parties. GeoCities was not allowed to collect personal identifying information from any child if GeoCities had actual knowledge that the child did not have his parents' permission to provide the information.
Neighborhoods
In 1996, GeoCities had 29 "neighborhoods," which had groupings of content created by the "homesteaders" (GeoCities users). By 1999, GeoCities had additional neighborhoods and refocused existing neighborhoods.- Area51 and Vault – Science fiction and fantasy
- Athens and Acropolis – Teaching, education, reading, writing, and philosophy
- Augusta – Golf
- Baja – Off-road SUVs and adventure travel
- BourbonStreet – Jazz music, Cajun food, New Orleans and Southern United StatesSouthern United StatesThe Southern United States—commonly referred to as the American South, Dixie, or simply the South—constitutes a large distinctive area in the southeastern and south-central United States...
topics - Broadway – Theater and performing arts
- CapeCanaveral and Lab – Science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and aviation
- CapitolHill – Politics and government
- CollegePark and Quad – University life
- Colosseum, Field and Loge – Athletics and sports
- EnchantedForest – Topics of interest to children
- Eureka – Small business and home offices
- Fashion Avenue – Fashion
- Heartland and Plains – Parenting and family (Originally also focused on pets)
- Hollywood and Hills – Films and actors
- HotSprings – Health and fitness
- MadisonAvenue – Advertising
- MotorCity – Automobiles and racing and dodge cars
- NapaValley – Wine
- Nashville – Country music
- LeftBank – Romance, poetry, and the arts (For Paris-related topics such as food and culture around 1996)
- Pentagon – Military
- Petsburgh – Pets
- Picket Fence – Home improvement and real estate
- Pipeline – Extreme sports
- RainForest – Conservation
- RodeoDrive – Shopping and upscale lifestyles
- Research Triangle – Research and Development, technology
- SiliconValley, Heights, Park, and Pines – Computers, hardware, programming, and technology
- SoHo and Lofts – Art and writing
- SouthBeach and Marina – A "high-style hot spot for hanging out, meeting and greeting, seeing and being seen."
- SunsetStrip, Vine, Alley, Palms, Studio and Towers – Music such as blues, grunge, punk rock, and rock 'n roll
- TheTropics and Shores – Travel and vacations
- TelevisionCity – Television
- TimesSquare and Arcade – Computer and video games
- Tokyo – Far East-related topics, including anime
- Vienna – Ballet, classical music, and opera
- WallStreet – Business and finance
- Wellesley – Women-related topics
- WestHollywood – Gay, Lesbian, bisexual, and transgender topics
- Yosemite – Outdoor recreation including climbing, hiking, rafting, and skiing
GeoCities Marketplace
In 1999 GeoCities had an online commercial presence with GeoCities Marketplace. It included the GeoStore, which sold GeoCities-branded merchandise. Users cashed in GeoPoints in the store.GeoCities Japan
Prior to the takeover by Yahoo!Yahoo!
Yahoo! Inc. is an American multinational internet corporation headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, United States. The company is perhaps best known for its web portal, search engine , Yahoo! Directory, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Groups, Yahoo! Answers, advertising, online mapping ,...
, GeoCities had a Japanese subsidiary, GeoCities Japan. GeoCities Japan was headquartered in the Nihonbashi Hakozaki Building in the Nihonbashi
Nihonbashi
, or Nihombashi, is a business district of Chūō, Tokyo, Japan which grew up around the bridge of the same name which has linked two sides of the Nihonbashi River at this site since the 17th century. The first wooden bridge was completed in 1603, and the current bridge made of stone dates from 1911...
area of Chūō
Chuo, Tokyo
is one of the 23 special wards that form the heart of Tokyo, Japan. The ward refers to itself as Chūō City in English.Its Japanese name literally means "Central Ward," and it is historically the main commercial center of Tokyo, although Shinjuku has risen to challenge it since the end of World War II...
, Tokyo
Tokyo
, ; officially , is one of the 47 prefectures of Japan. Tokyo is the capital of Japan, the center of the Greater Tokyo Area, and the largest metropolitan area of Japan. It is the seat of the Japanese government and the Imperial Palace, and the home of the Japanese Imperial Family...
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As of November 3, 2011, GeoCities Japan is still online, with no signs of upcoming closure. Its member sites are still accessible, and it is still accepting new account registrations, but now all services are only available in Japanese
Japanese language
is a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is a member of the Japonic language family, which has a number of proposed relationships with other languages, none of which has gained wide acceptance among historical linguists .Japanese is an...
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Japan neighborhoods
GeoCities Japan has the following neighborhoods:– Finance and business – Dining – Outdoor sports and health – Computers and the internet – Travel – Science and high technology – Education and student life – Family and pets – Films and performing arts – Video games – Pop, rock music, and concerts – Fashion, design, and shopping – Dating – Automobiles and motorcycles
See also
- AOL HometownAOL HometownAOL Hometown was a web hosting service offered by AOL. It offered 12 megabytes of server space for AOL subscribers to publish their own websites, and included an own WYSIWYG online website builder called 1-2-3 Publish not requiring knowledge of HTML...
- Comparison of free web hosting services
- WikiaWikiaWikia is a free web hosting service for wikis . It is normally free of charge for readers and editors, deriving most of its income from advertising, and publishes all user-provided text under copyleft licenses. Wikia hosts several hundred thousand wikis using the open-source wiki software MediaWiki...
External links
- Yahoo! GeoCities Japan (still online & active)
- Yahoo! GeoCities (most pages were disabled on 27.10.2009)
- Archive at Wayback Machine
- Archive at Webcite
- Yahoo! Canada GeoCities (most pages were disabled on 27.10.2009)
- Yahoo! GeoCities Germany (most pages were disabled on 27.10.2009 )
- Yahoo! GeoCities UK And Ireland
- Yahoo! Relents on GeoCities Terms of Service – CNET NEWS
- The Geocities-izer