14 DAY TRIAL // Following its Q2 report, Yahoo announced it would be discontinuing another batch of APIs and services in the following months. The two biggest casualties with this latest report are Yahoo's Maps and Pipes services.
For a couple of years, Yahoo has been slowly shutting down more tools than it has been putting up, and we are starting to wonder how much it can keep it up.
This time around, Yahoo decided to pull the plug on some services that while not entirely unknown, they weren't quite as bad as some of their previously closed applications.
Good bye Maps and Pipes! We still love you!
Starting with July 2015, the Yahoo Maps service will be shut down, mainly its publicly accessible URL: maps.yahoo.com. The mapping toolkit itself will continue to be used internally at Yahoo, for other services like its search engine and by the Flickr staff.
Yahoo Pipes will also shut down on August 30, the service functioning in read-only mode until September 30 when it will be taken offline for good.
These two are quite a blow for developers, still being valuable products even now, especially Pipes, a service for aggregating data from different websites and sources without actually having to write complex code for it, using only a visual editor.
Other lesser known tools get the ax as well
While the two aforementioned tools are quite solid products, the same can't be said about the GeoPlanet & PlaceSpotter APIs, which have had their functionality ported to Yahoo's YQL and BOSS utilities, making them obsolete.
Other features Yahoo won't be supporting is contacts syncing on older Macs, and the Yahoo Mail app on iOS 4 and older. For these services, the company advises users to use their Web-based interfaces instead, via their smartphone's browser.
Last but not least, there are also a bulk of local services being shut down, like: Yahoo TV in the UK, France, Germany, Spain, Italy and Canada; Yahoo Music in France and Canada; Yahoo Autos in the UK, France, Germany, Spain and Italy; Yahoo Movies in Spain; Yahoo Entertainment in Singapore; and the Yahoo Philippines homepage.
