Founded in 1994 as Beverly Hills Internet, GeoCities was purchased in 1999 by Yahoo for approximately $3 billion and it’s possible it never made a profit for Yahoo. On the site, anyone could create her or his own Web page for free. Earlier this year Yahoo stopped accepting new Web page registrations, and while current GeoCities members could still update their sites they were advised time and again to convert to the Yahoo Web hosting program at $4.99 per month. This morning GeoCities is no longer viewable.

The Los Angeles Times write an excellent piece on the story of GeoCities, calling it “perhaps the most epic failure in Yahoo’s portfolio” and wondering aloud why Yahoo didn’t keep the site up and sell advertising to support it. The response from Yahoo was vague. GeoCities was popular, and in fact, AIM Group published ComScore traffic reports this January that showed GeoCities generating 69 million visitors, to earn the title of sixth most popular Web site.

Two organizations, ArchiveTeam and Archive.org, have been working furiously to retrieve and save as many GeoCities personal pages as they can before the site closes down, though much of it is certain to be lost due to time limitations.

ArchiveTeam is headed by Jason Scott, owner of the ASCII blog about computer history and trivia, and owner of the TextFiles.com family of Web sites. Scott talked to Los Angeles Times about the project. “The group of dedicated digital historians have been pointing about a hundred computers at the GeoCities domain 24 hours a day for months,” wrote LA Times. “First, the machines crawled the neighborhoods, duplicating copies of everything in sight.

“The hard part was going through and trying to find random user names,” Scott told the Times. “Basically, we’re hitting Google and crawling in every direction.”

ArchiveTeam is composed of volunteers, and it’s wiki site was first established in January 2009. One very interesting feature of the site is DeathWatch, where site closing are not only posted but projected as well. In DeathWatch is a prediction that Facebook will buy FriendFeed.

The ongoing archival projects of ArchiveTeam still need others to help. Scott seeks:

    *  Writers, who can create clear essays and instructions for archivists and concerned parties.

    * People with lots of hosted disk space who have a proper hosted Web server and fat pipe, willing (when asked) to host  mirrored deadsites or archives.
    * People who love setting up torrents who can do the same as the mirror folks, but do so hosting torrents.
    * OCD-rich individuals who want to download things who will respond to our alerts and call outs and download entire sites or diagnose ways to get at obfuscated data.

To help, (and virally market your media house at the same time) write to jason@textfiles.com. Archive.org, creator of the Wayback Machine, is helping as well, and so far about a terabyte of data has been retrieved.