14 DAY TRIAL // The latest round of layoffs at Yahoo isn't the only piece of bad news at the company. Along with the people fired, Yahoo will be shutting down several of its products and restructuring others including Delicious, MyBlogLog, Yahoo Buzz and AltaVista. While some, particularly Delicious had a solid core audience, Yahoo let them all dwindle to the point that their closure is nothing more than a formality.
Rumors of the closures started circulating yesterday and Yahoo has since confirmed some of them. Several of them make sense since they didn't pick up any Steam.
Others, from acquisitions, have been left to die. Most people are upset about the closure of Delicious, which hasn't been confirmed by Yahoo.
A internal presentation slide indicating which products were to be shut down, merged into others or turned into features was leaked, but Yahoo hasn't confirmed plans for many on the list.
"Part of our organizational streamlining involves cutting our investment in underperforming or off-strategy products to put better focus on our core strengths and fund new innovation in the next year and beyond," Yahoo said in a statement.
"We continuously evaluate and prioritize our portfolio of products and services, and do plan to shut down some products in the coming months such as Yahoo! Buzz, our Traffic APIs, and others. We will communicate specific plans when appropriate," Yahoo added.
Delicious is a social bookmarking service that enables users to share their bookmarks and see what others found interesting on the web. It was acquired by Yahoo in 2005, but the company, like with many of its acquisitions, hasn't done much with it.
MyBlogLog shares a similar story. The blog-based social network was acquired in 2007, but Yahoo didn't do anything to move it forward. Plenty of other acquisitions have shared their fate, making it hardly surprising that few companies are will be to be acquired by Yahoo.
The web giant was rejected by both Foursquare and more recently Groupon. Granted, both companies are still independent, with Groupon rejecting a huge offer from Google very recently.