Yahoo Inc. said it plans to shut down GeoCities -- the personal profile service it bought for more than $4 billion in 1999 -- the latest casualty in Chief Executive Carol Bartz's campaign to shutter duplicative and underperforming products.
The company posted a notice on the GeoCities site saying it is no longer giving out new accounts for the service, which hosts user-created Web pages. The company said it would close the site later this year and will notify customers about how to save data they have uploaded to it, encouraging customers to upgrade to Yahoo's subscription Web hosting service.
The news comes as Yahoo said it will lay off 675 workers in the coming weeks through cuts targeted at certain products.
Ms. Bartz, who joined Yahoo in January, has already begun to reduce Yahoo's sprawling portfolio to focus on flagship services. The company recently announced it was closing two start-ups it acquired and tried to integrate in recent years: Jumpcut, an online video-editing service, and FareChase, a travel Web site.
GeoCities allows users to create personal pages with photos and other information, and to associate them with particular communities or neighborhoods. But its technology, designed for slower Internet connections, is crude by today's standards. Later social-networking sites, such as Friendster, MySpace and Facebook, have attracted much larger audiences.
[the article was originally published at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124052150483049791.html]
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