Yahoo has decided to redirect employee focus on several important tools

Jul 3, 2014 13:23 GMT  ·  By

Yahoo has decided to cut off nine of its products in order to focus on other tools. For instance, the Internet giant will no longer be working on People Search or Xobni, a recently acquired email app.

The company wants to be able to devote its full attention to Tumblr and Flickr, which isn’t such a bad idea considering that the latter stopped working earlier today in all corners of the world.

“We took a hard look at our products and have shut down some of the less popular ones and integrated widely-loved features from others into core Yahoo experiences. We first announced these changes in March and April 2013 and remain committed to communicating product updates that affect our users now and in the future,” Yahoo said.

Therefore, the company will be shutting down a series of tools, while others are already offline.

Newlook Service, the online virtual makeover tool for maktoob.yahoo.com was shut down on April 30, while the Research Reports feature for Yahoo Finance was closed at the same time.

As of May 26, Bookmarks.yahoo.com is no longer working either and Yahoo is redirecting users to the toolbar for Firefox or Internet Explorer, where all content can be accessed and edited.

Talking about the toolbar, the Chrome version will be removed from the Chrome web store by July 22. This will happen so that Yahoo comply with the recent policy updates pushed by Google. It will, however, be replaced by the Yahoo Extension for Chrome, which will offer users quick access to the Yahoo homepage.

People Search, a defunct directory site that is no longer useful due to the capabilities taken on by the regular search engine, was closed down yesterday.

Xobni, a company acquired by Yahoo back in July 2013, was shut down yesterday too, along with the Smartr Product Suite. However, several Xobni-like features have been incorporated into Yahoo Mail, such as the compose auto-suggest feature and the people-centric mail search.

Yahoo Shine is shutting down too come July 31. In the past few months, the company has created several digital magazines, such as Yahoo Beauty and Yahoo Travel, which now cover the popular topics from Shine.

Lastly, Yahoo Voices and the Yahoo Contributor Network are shutting down on July 31, and at the end of August, respectively.

As these services disappear, Yahoo will focus on four areas that it has deemed as the most important – search, communications, digital magazines and video. That being said, Yahoo is putting Flickr and Tumblr at the center of it all.