Yahoo! has spruced up its GeoCities service, and made it a whole lot simpler. The interface is much better, with tabs for quick access to different tools for site-building. It also gives quicker access to site statistics, bandwidth usage statistics, redesigned help pages, and link creators. That is, a good user experience, something that it lacked earlier; and because of which I shifted to Blogger. I’m not going back, though.
What they haven’t done is upgraded their file-manager (it’s still the same old thing), added new features or tools. You still can’t use FTP or use PageBuilder to edit in subdirectories.
I think this has basically been done to woo users to upgrade to the premium plans, by presenting the ‘easy-to-use-Yahoo!’ interface, but unless it does something spectacular, Yahoo! GeoCities may never recover from its decline which started after it (temporarily) said a few years ago that it would own the copyright for published material. How about offering more storage and bandwidth, on the Gmail level, that would create a lot of positive publicity for Yahoo!. Making the bandwidth meter monthly rather than hourly will help. A watch can be maintained to see that the free accounts are not used for commercial activity. Normal users won’t require that much space, so Yahoo! servers probably wont’t be flooded with traffic. Only a miniscule percent of users will utilise the extra storage. More bandwidth = More viewers = More ad revenue for Yahoo!. In all, a win-win situation for Yahoo!
Otherwise, it could offer more features like FTP instead of more storage, but limit the types of files that can be uploaded.