Early adopters and original archeticts of the internet are in mourning this, er, morning with the news that Yahoo! will be shutting down GeoCities. A release from the internet powerhouse readers:

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. We will be closing GeoCities later this year.

GeoCities was the web’s easiest and most user friendly way of designing your own piece of internet real-estate for years before it was bought up by Yahoo! for the princely sum of $3bn back in the dot com boom.

On the one hand, I won’t miss it as someone who a) never used it and b) was eternally frustrated when my search results came up heavy with GeoCities logos like badges of untrustworthy fact. On the other hand, I’ve never built my own website. It might have been a good place to start. Oh well.

(via Mashable)