Geocities Not Closing Down By: David Emery

A rampantly circulating email claiming that Yahoo will soon close GeoCities, it's extremely popular platform for building personal Web pages, is a hoax, according to a Yahoo corporate spokesperson. "It's absolutely not true," Mary Osako, Senior PR Manager for Yahoo Inc., said on Monday. "GeoCities is and will contenue to be thriving online community." Indeed, there are no signs of an impending change on the Geocities home page, where users are invited, as always, to sign up and create their own sites for free of charge. "We are still actively seeking new members," Osako said. She ventured no theories as to where the false rumor might have come from. "New Internet rumors get started every day. This is just the latest one." A similar rumor showed up in Usenet discussions in March but apparently wasn't timely enough to capture the public's fancy. This newer version, first sighted on April 27, has shot from modem to modem faster than a speeding bullet. Plenty of recent articals have referred to Yahoo's financial woes and it's intention to move in the direction of fee-based services to generate more revenue, but none have forecast the closure of existing parts of the service to cut costs.