Yahoo has decided to discontinue the process of allowing new customers to sign up for GeoCities accounts and will be closing GeoCities later this year, the company announced.

GeoCities, a free service that hosts personal home pages for consumers, was acquired for more than $4 billion 10 years ago. Geocities was among the first online communities with more than 3.5 million websites hosted in the late 1990s. However, today's social network sites such as Facebook and Myspace have become popular among Web users.

Yahoo will not change any existing GeoCities accounts. Users can continue to use their web sites and GeoCities services until later this year. Later this year, Yahoo will be closing all GeoCities accounts and web sites.