ReadWriteWeb

Between LAUNCH and DEMO, this last week has seen more than its fair share of startups. Among these companies, we've seen a number of DIY mobile app creation tools throw their hat into the ring and promise a world where getting your company into someone's hands is as simple as dragging and dropping a couple of buttons.

With all of these democratizing, empowering tools hitting the market, there's just one question - are we about to relive the era of <blink> tag text and marquee side-scrolling banner ads?

Posters on the wall, teen magazines, boom boxes playing the same stupid songs over and over again (automatically!) - that's not a sustainable situation, by definition. That's teenage living and that's what MySpace built its huge site on. Just like being a teenager, MySpace is something that most people grow out of. Today marked an important point in the internet's move beyond MySpace.

The company ushered Tom out the door today from President into an advisory role is in talks with Tom about a new role if he leaves his post as President, and replaced its CEO with former Facebook business exec Owen Van Natta. Increased revenue isn't really what MySpace needs, if it's to stay strong it needs to stop bleeding users. That's not likely.

Yahoo has announced that its website creation service GeoCities, which it acquired for $4.5 billion in 1999, will close later this year. Existing customers are being encouraged to "upgrade" to Yahoo! Web Hosting, which offers a site-building service and a personalized web address. The closing of GeoCities is the end of an era. Last June, we profiled the rise of "GeoCities 2.0" services, i.e. website creation tools for the Social Web. Many of them will attempt to pick up GeoCities' customers. Although, as Yahoo! itself indicated in its closure message, website building is mostly a 'feature' nowadays rather than a separate product. So, is this a viable business now for the likes of Weebly and Yola?

In Web 1.0 there were a number of browser-based website creation platforms - e.g. Geocities, Angelfire, Tripod, Homestead and Brinkster (I myself used nearly all of those, back in the day). These apps were very popular in the mid to late 90's, because they made web publishing relatively easy. The most successful one, Geocities, was eventually acquired by Yahoo! in 1999. Do these tools still exist, in the Web 2.0 era?