Yahoo ! GeoCities: Now Closing after 15 Years of Web presence

Geocities was created in 1994 as an easy way for people to create a Web presence. Fifteen years later, Yahoo has decided to close the doors on the iconic webpage service. Ars reminisces upon the good times of Geocities.

U.S. Internet search giant Yahoo! Inc., said it would close out GeoCities, a personal Web page service it purchased for $2.9 billion in 1999. The GeoCities Web page now sports a prominent note that says, “Sorry, new GeoCities accounts are no longer available.”

Yahoo bought GeoCities for more than $2.9 billion in dot-com-priced stock in 1999, when GeoCities had more than 1.1 million users. However, while the idea of having a personal presence on the Internet has caught on, GeoCities turned out to be a backwater, not the mainstream.

Still unclear is what exactly will become of GeoCities pages. New sign-ups are already no longer permitted, but what about existing sites?

Here’s how Yahoo put it: “You can continue to enjoy your Web site and GeoCities services until later this year. You don’t need to change a thing right now–we just wanted you to let you know about the closure as soon as possible. We’ll provide more details about closing GeoCities and how to save your site data this summer, and we will update the help center with more details at that time.”

The purchase 10 years ago anticipated the popularity of personal Web pages, but GeoCities did not match up to the interactive capabilities of social networking services, like Facebook, Cnet said. Unsurprisingly, Geocities has declined in popularity in recent years thanks to the plethora of similar and easier-to-use services—not to mention the rise of social networks like MySpace that allow the same demographic to make equally horrific pages and try to pick each other up at the same time. Add to that the explosive popularity of various blog platforms and the suffering of the online advertising market, and it’s really not a shock to see Geocities going the way of the dodo.

Google shuts down many Products

Just recently, Google’s 3D world Lively was shut down. Now Google announced they’re canceling a couple of other products or product features. These are:

• Mobile service Dodgeball. “We have decided to discontinue Dodgeball.com in the next couple of months, after which this service will no longer be available,” Google says. The original founders of this Google-acquired company already left a while ago in frustration due to Google allegedly not evolving their product.

• The Mashup editor, which is still only available in a limited test version. This product, originally released in 2007, was letting you create programs accessing and mixing APIs like the Google Maps API. Google suggests the App Engine would now be the way to go, as far as Google products go. “Existing Mashup Editor applications will stop receiving traffic in six months,” Google notes.

• Video uploading at Google Video. For quite a while now Google had made acquired YouTube their official video upload site, at least judging by things like where Google uploaded their own content for official blog posts (and judging by how much easier it was to get videos onto YouTube in terms of speed and lack of bugs). Google Video is a meta video search engine these days. Now that change in direction has become more completed and official: “In a few months, we will discontinue support for uploads to Google Video,” Google writes, adding that existing uploaded content won’t be removed, though.

• Google Catalog. This was a bit of a precursor to Google Print, now known as Google Book Search. The scanned and OCR’d catalogs of this collection are painfully out of date by now, tough. “[W]e’re bidding it a fond farewell” Google says, stating they want to focus efforts “to bring more and more types of offline information such as magazines, newspapers and of course, books, online.”

• Last not least, Google Notebook – while not being directly canceled – won’t be worked on anymore. “Starting next week, we plan to stop active development on Google Notebook. This means we’ll no longer be adding features or offer Notebook for new users.” Google say they will continue offer the service for existing users. The Notebook extension won’t be supported anymore, though, Google adds. Google suggests users look into Google Docs, as well as the SearchWiki feature.
  

An Interaction between Human and technology

Human: Technology, you are my servant!

Technology: OK, but you will pay for me right?
Human: Sure! Will do.
Technology: Will you also update me from time to time?
Human: OK, I can do that.
Technology: Also, would you mind handling my cables? I have a lot.
Human: Cables? Hmm, OK, if that’s what you need…
Technology: Please also watch my blinking buttons and displays every now and then.
Human: Yeah OK…
Technology: And repair me every now and then.
Human: Yes yes, of course.
Technology: Also lock me up safely to prevent me from being stolen.
Human: Of course I will!
Technology: Also provide fallbacks for me if I break OK?
Human: Hmm, sure, yeah…
Technology: I might beep or ring every once in a while which means I need your attention.
Human: OK, yes fine, I will give you my attention every now and then.
Technology: But please, when you use me the wrong way, it can lead to disaster fast.
Human: Right. I’m aware of that. Is there anything else? See, I don’t have a lot of …
Technology: … also, always make sure to plug me in, as I need a lot of energy.
Human: Yes, I know. I …
Technology: … sometimes I also need wireless input so please carry me around until I find it…
Human: Yes of course, I mean I …
Technology: By the way, not all my cables are the same, so make sure to only plug in the right ones, and don’t mix them up.
Human: Technology, I know I know… is there anything else you need?
Technology: No, I am your servant. I don’t want to cause any troubles.
Human: That’s very considerate of you. I …
Technology: Did I mention I’m often bad for the environment?
Human: Technology! I think it’s time you…
Technology: Oh, I sometimes contain bugs or a nasty virus, did I mention that?
Human: I …
Technology: And awful usability? And overlong manuals? And bad phone support? And crooked advertisement promises?
Human: Why you rotten little … will you please just shut up?
Technology: Shut up?
Human: I mean, I …
Technology: Master, you called me into your service. You know I’ll disappear at the push of a button.
Human: Well, I didn’t mean it quite like that, what I’m saying is …
Technology: Hang on a second, I’m freezing now to load something.
Human: What?
Technology: …
Human: Oh well, I guess I’ll have to wait.
Technology: Thank you, I’m back. There was a small program error that unfortunately erased part of my short term memory.
Human: What?! You …
Technology: What were we talking about?
Human: That you are my servant, of course!
Technology: Right. That I know. But you will pay for me right?
[discussion continues for some more millennia]

Happy Birthday:Computer mouse celebrates 40th birthday

He is not called Mickey. But he is as naughty a mouse as the ever young cartoon character, which conquered the silver screen and the animation industry some eighty years back.He is the mouse who made Mickey and Minnie crawl into your drawing room and the computer screen in many shape and drape and next week the computer mouse, which animated many a cartoon character and redefined the way we used the computer graphics, is turning forty; to be precise, on December 9.

The computer mouse is to celebrate its 40th birthday next week. Invented by Doug Engelbart and his team at the Stanford Research Institute in California, the input device method first debuted in 1968. The first-ever mouse was made from a wooden block with wheels mounted on its base, and featured a red button on top of its case, and a cable at its back, which probably made one of the researchers to nickname it as “mouse”.

Mouse for everyone

The mouse was developed by Xerox during the 1970s, and the first commercial product was released in 1981 with the launch of the Xerox Star computer system. But it wasn’t until Apple acquired the license for the mouse for $40,000 from the Standford Institute that the technology really took off. The Apple Macintosh, launched in 1984, used the mouse to good effect, and is the machine widely credited with kick-starting the home computer revolution. The mouse became the default input method on most computers for the next two decades.

Since then a mouse has been the default input method for computers but now it faces stiff with the development of gesture control and touch-screen interfaces as used in the Apple iPhone and the Nintendo Wii.

“I’m feeling lucky” button costs Google $110 million per year

Google cofounder Sergey Brin told public radio’s Marketplace that around one percent of all Google searches go through the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button. Because the button takes users directly to the top search result, Google doesn’t get to show search ads on one percent of all its searches. That costs the company around $110 million in annual revenue, according to Rapt’s Tom Chavez. So why does Google keep such a costly button around?

“It’s possible to become too dry, too corporate, too much about making money. I think what’s delightful about ‘I’m Feeling Lucky’ is that it reminds you there are real people here,” Google exec Marissa Mayer explained, or at least tried to.