Geocities is owned by Yahoo!
It's the exact same thing Homestead did years ago, except with Homestead you got this fancy sitebuilder with it that had a billion features for you to play with. I bet it was all a test... bet they just used people who wanted free sites to test their sitebuilder out and tweak it for future customers.
I had a geocities too, I got that e-mail last week sometime. I haven't seen my geocities in a long time. I used to use it for my web images I'd link to, and then I started using it for some buttons and markers on RoD... very quickly after that did it's monthly brandwidth run out. So instead I switched to Photobucket... It doesn't make any sense that they allow more transfer brandwidth than geocities. But they did... a lot more.