14 DAY TRIAL // Yahoo Buzz, a would be competitor to Digg, is about to get shutdown. It's not much of a surprise, Yahoo announced that it will be closing down the service a few months ago. Now we have a date, the site will no longer be working come April 21, 2011.
"Yahoo! Buzz will be discontinued as of April 21, 2011. As of this date, you will be unable to access the Yahoo! Buzz site. This was a hard decision. However this will help us focus on our core strengths and new innovations," Yahoo announced.
The announcement has actually been up for a couple of weeks, but it took until now for any of the tech blogs to notice, perhaps telling about Yahoo Buzz's popularity, or at the very least of how much the press cares about it.
Yahoo Buzz was launched in 2008 as a social news aggregator, hence the name. Despite Yahoo's might behind it, or perhaps because of it, it never caught on with too many users.
Late last year, as Yahoo continued to struggle with its restructuring, which is still ongoing, the company decided it was time for Buzz to sail off into the sunset.
It wasn't the only Yahoo service to get the axe then, several were killed off in one go.
"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 at the time, pretty much what it is saying now as well.
"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," it continued.