Yahoo is cleaning house and shutting down more services

Sep 27, 2014 13:52 GMT  ·  By

It looks like it’s fall cleaning time over at Yahoo, although the company is known for shutting down various tools and services whenever it sees fit.

Up next on the chopping block are Yahoo Education, Qwiki and Directory, which will get shut down in the next few months, allowing the company to focus on different projects.

Yahoo Education if going to be the first to shut down, with September 30 as the last day it will be available. The site was designed to help connect education providers with content, which doesn’t seem to be among the company’s top priorities at the moment.

“As we take a close look at our offerings, we identify areas outside of our core experiences where users’ needs are already well served by alternative online resources. For this reason, on September 30, we will close Yahoo Education, a site designed to connect users with education providers and content,” Yahoo writes about this the shutdown of this particular feature.

Recent acquisition on the way out the door

Qwiki is next in line with the last day it’s going to be used set on November 1. The app has been acquired by Yahoo back in July 2013 and it was expected to be left alone for at least a while longer. Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem to be the case and the tool that can create short movies based on events from a user’s camera is getting shut down. Unlike many other services Yahoo acquired, this one has already lived a long life, as the company commonly shuts down the startups it buys and integrates the teams within its own.

“The Qwiki team will continue to innovate on new digital media experiences for Yahoo users,” the company notes and invites users to download content created via Qwiki.

Lastly, Directory will be retired on December 31. As the name suggests, the service provides users with a list of websites. 20 years ago, when it was launched, it made sense since there weren’t so many websites out there, but it doesn’t have much room nowadays.

“While we’re committed to connecting users with the information they’re passionate about, our business has evolved and at the end of 2014, we will retire the Yahoo Directory. Advertisers will be upgraded to a new service,” Yahoo said, although it didn’t give additional details aside from saying that advertisers will be hearing from them directly.