As a part of CEO Carol Bartz's endeavors to streamline operations at Yahoo, it was announced on Thursday that the company is shutting down its GeoCities website. The 1995-founded free web hosting service passed into oblivion probably because of its rather archaic service model and out-of-date technology.

The service, founded by David Bohnett and John Rezner, was quite popular in the mid-1990s when teenagers and first-generation Internet users simply lapped up the idea of setting up personal pages in the choicest "cyber cities." As the service grew, GeoCities restructured itself with additional "cyber neighborhoods" featuring news, chat rooms, and polls. It also expanded its storage offering from 6MB to 11MB.

However, the $4.7 billion acquisition of GeoCities by Yahoo in 1990 saw the removal of most of GeoCities' trademark assets - including the "cyber city" foundation of the service - as Yahoo attempted to convert GeoCities into a profit-spinning business enterprise.

Though GeoCities will remain functional till mid-year, Yahoo is urging GeoCities users to upgrade to Yahoo Web Hosting service. In a FAQ on the GeoCities site, Yahoo has informed users about the proceedings saying: "You don't need to change a thing right now. 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."