GEOCITIES used to be the place many people made their first website, but now it’s shutting up shop.

Yahoo announced it is closing GeoCities, a free service that hosts personal home pages, which it acquired 10 years ago during the dotcom boom.

The service, which became synonymous with early amateur websites and old-school animated images, is no longer accepting new customers and will be closing later this year.

GeoCities was among the first companies to build online communities, with more than 3.5 million websites hosted on its service in the late 1990s. Yahoo acquired GeoCities in 1999 in a stock deal valued at over $4.6 billion.

But the web service fell out of favour in recent years, as a generation of social network sites such as Facebook and Myspace have become popular among web user.

To mark the occasion, popular web comic xkcd changed its layout to resemble a stereotypical GeoCities webpage complete with scrolling text , animated icons, and broken image links.

GeoCities was founded in 1994 as Beverly Hills Internet and bought by Yahoo during the infamous dot-com boom in Silicon Valley.