14 DAY TRIAL // In an unsurprising move, Yahoo decided to kill off support for the Xooping Gmail plugin. Yahoo acquired Xoopit, maker of a rather popular Gmail plugin, which allows users to view image attachments and other media from different emails grouped together, back in July. Yahoo Mail has had a version of the plugin available for a while now and the company claims discontinuing the support will allow the team to focus solely on Yahoo Mail.
“Xoopit teamed up with Yahoo! in July 2009. We are excited to be making the world's best email platform a fantastic place to see and share photos, and decided that the best way to make that happen is to focus on our effort on Yahoo! Mail. We’re sad to say goodbye to our users on Gmail but we know that we will not be able to keep investing in our Xoopit for Gmail product, and don't want you to end up with a lousy experience,” Xoopit and Yahoo announced.
Users will have until November 13 to download any files they may have stored on the service that they may have deleted from Gmail. Normally, all the files indexed by the Xoopit plugin should still be available in Gmail so users will not lose any data as a result of the closure. After November 13, users won't be able to access the data from the service and Yahoo will hold the files for an additional 90 days according to its own policies for data retention.
Yahoo claims that the move will free up resources, allowing Xoopit to focus on the Yahoo Mail implementation and that continuing the Gmail service might have resulted in a poor quality experience. While this may be a valid reason, Yahoo certainly had the capability to continue support but creating a plugin that makes a competing service better isn't something most companies do. Google may be doing it with the Chrome Frame for Internet Explorer but its motives are a bit disingenuous.