Back in the days, online storage ^[1] services and websites were virtually restricted to two popular services. Yahoo ^[2] Briefcase was a real whooper of a service which provided 2 MB of disk storage space, which was later increased to 6MB, as the mail storage grew in Yahoo Mail.

Another popular website creation service was, Yahoo Geocities ^[3], where millions of websites were created and shared among users. In fact, Geocities had a cult following from different sectors, including lay users who just wanted to put personal information, budding writers, software developers and even software pirates.

Sadly two of the most popular services will no longer be available. Yahoo Briefcase closed down operations ^[4] earlier this year, on 30th March 2009. Yahoo Geocities will be closed down tomorrow on 26th October 2009.

In today’s age, not many people will be affected by this closure, since creating a website is cheap, and users get unlimited web storage and domains names for dirt cheap. However, the legacy of Geocities will always continue to live a long life, among early Internet adopters.

Computer World reports ^[5] that, a team of people are trying their best to archive all the treasures hosted on Geocities, which contains around 10 Terabytes of information ^[6]. It would be really sad, if that much amount of information, disappeared from web archives ^[7]. The Archive team ^[8] is doing a really commendable job of protecting that information.

Did you ever have a Geocities account? What is your take on them closing down a hugely popular service?