GeoCities Becomes a Portal

The personal Web page host adds a content directory and news to its services.

Lisa Moskowitz, PC World

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Last week GeoCities revealed a revamped Web site that organizes information using a directory-like format. The service's 40 themed neighborhoods are divvied up into 14 content-specific groups called GeoAvenues. Topics include Arts and Literature, Business and Money, Society, Computers and Technology, and Sports and Recreation. Clicking a GeoAvenue links you to a topic page where you'll find subtopics, an interactive poll, and news provided by such outlets as ZDNet, ESPN SportsZone, and Women's Wire.

In addition to GeoAvenues, the GeoCities home page sports a GeoNews Center featuring stories from Reuters, as well as links to its Chat and Forum services. In many ways, GeoCities is well positioned for portalhood: the site already offers chat, free e-mail, and free Web page hosting to 1.9 million users, or Homesteaders.

The addition of a content directory and news puts GeoCities in a competitive position with Yahoo, Excite, and other budding portals. On the flip side, other sites are beginning to get into the personal Web publishing game. America Online, for example, is readying its AOL.com site to provide free Web page publishing services as well. The new AOL service is scheduled for a trial launch in late July.

GeoCities also announced that it has increased the free disk space allocated to each user to 11MB from 6MB. GeoPlus members who pay $4.95 per month for additional services are now entitled to 25MB of space. All member pages also have a link back to the original GeoCities topic page, for better navigation.

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