At Home

When GeoCities Grabbed the Web's Golden Ticket–A Trip Down Silicon-Valley-Has-No-Memory Lane

Kara Swisher in News on April 24, 2009 at 12:13 am PT

In Web years, BoomTown is now officially 143 years old. Why? Well, I was the one who got to write the big Page One piece in The Wall Street Journal after GeoCities was sold to Yahoo in January of 1999 for $5 billion in stock. GeoCities was, in its way, the Facebook of its time. But, instead of “friends,” its users were “homesteaders.” As Cher so eloquently sings: Those were the days my friend, we thought they’d never end. Except they did. Yahoo announced yesterday that it was closing the GeoCities unit down, part of new CEO Carol Bartz’s war against useless assets at the troubled company. But let’s take a stroll down memory lane, shall we?