Following layoffs, Yahoo has decided to shutdown AltaVista, Delicious and many other services. MyBlogLog, Yahoo! Picks, AltaVista, Yahoo! Bookmarks, Yahoo! Buzz and Delicious will be shutdown by Yahoo.com.
UPDATE: Delicious is not shutting down.
Yahoo will also merge other products like FoxyTunes, Events, People Search, Sideline, FireEagle, and make Yahoo Deals, Avatars, Alerts, Widgets, Greetings, Babel Fish, Calendar, Address Book, Notepad, and Message Boards into Features.
Yahoo has issued a statement to this effect:
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. 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.
Via AllThingsDigital.
As a long time Yahoo user, I am a bit sad about this piece of news. Though Yahoo is still strong, it is slowly degenerating. The services that they plan to ‘sunset’ are the kinds of services that kept people coming back to Yahoo. I wonder what their new focus will be.
Altavista will go down in history as one of the biggest missed opportunities of the Internet age. Wow…