Yahoo shuts down six products | Hacker News Reader

Yahoo shuts down six products

ycorpblog.com

58 pointsshill47 comments

What I find even more interesting that these shutdowns is that an entry from the Yahoo corp blog has made it to the front page of Hacker News. This may be a sign that people are starting to find Yahoo related news interesting again.

I believe it's more people find Marissa Meyer interesting, rather then Yahoo.

Edit: I will add, her position as CEO IS interesting, as are the changes that she is making.

I probably titled it poorly, but my earlier post[1] about Yahoo's new mobile weather app (Yahoo doing mobile right?!?) didn't get past a single point. :P

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5577427

Which is a shame because it's pretty beautiful.

Even the Yahoo Mail app (despite crashing a lot on my phone) is admittedly a lot better looking.

Have you checked forecast.io? It is even more interesting because it is a website which looks like a mobile app. Besides, the weather data it provides is awesomely simple.

Thanks for pointing that out!

Like the sibling commenter here, I find that I almost exclusively check the weather on my phone, but I'll keep this at the back of my mind for more thought-out planning. :)

Sorry, I just can't get excited about yet another weather app, even one done well. In practice, I use the Notification Center weather on my iPhone, and Dark Sky for rain alerts.

Only now do we begin to appreciate the Machiavellian dimensions of the Summly acquisition!

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Ironically, that's exactly how I think of Yahoo: stuck in 2006 and "are they dead yet?"

Wow, the whole domain is showing that error.

I'm waiting for the corp blog to come back up and list 7 products being shutdown, with the corp blog itself being the 7th item on the list.

People used Yahoo in 2006?

Not sure if you're being sarcastic or not but a decade or so ago, before Google arrived on the scene, Yahoo! was actually very popular.

Google was on the scene well before 2006. I think that comment was meant to be interpreted as

"people still used Yahoo! as late as 2006?"

Verge article, since it seems dead: http://www.theverge.com/2013/4/19/4243852/yahoo-shuts-down-d...

Here's the list:

>Deals, Yahoo Upcoming (and its API), Yahoo Kids, Yahoo SMS Alerts, and the J2ME feature phone versions of Yahoo Mail and Yahoo Messenger, all on April 30th.

Yahooligans was my introduction to the web. I'm sad to see it go. I hope it remains well-archived.

Yahooligans was my elementary school computer classes! :(

I don't understand why Yahoo! never properly promoted Upcoming.org. In fact, I don't understand why companies like Yahoo! go out of their way to acquire nice things only to abandon them when the next new, shiny thing comes along.

It's part of the dysfunction.

It's probably a good call to shut down these services. Yahoo has to change to survive.

What's not good is the amount of notice. 3 months should be the absolute minimum notice for shutting down a service. Otherwise you lose users' trust and that closes doors on future opportunities.

Not pertinent to the discussion, but why does some of the links use http://google.com/url?q= prefix for redirecting URLs? Any advantage of doing so instead of directly linking to the posts?

Because whomever wrote this article was Googling the results (yes, the irony is palpable) and simply copied the URL, which is prefixed in Google's SERP.

Whatever happened to Upcoming as a concept? It took quite a while for Lanyrd to fill the gap for tech conference goers, but that's basically just "us".

I just wonder why this turned out not to be a viable service. I would think there would have been a market for a global event calendar, and Upcoming at one time seemed well on it's way to being that until it got "Flickr-ed" by Yahoo.

I wish it had gotten Flickr-ed. Flickr grew 2-3 orders of magnitude under Yahoo and is still the dominant site for photos you might want to look at again.

If Mayer's playbook is to make Yahoo like Google, and to do what Page does from quarter-to-quarter, I don't think that's a bad plan actually.

Yahoo exists strictly on momentum at this point, so it's not a matter of re-org to fix - it's a matter or org. Might as well clone Google for the seed and go from there.

Agreed. For one, it seems that Yahoo mail app on my Android syncs and works much faster than GMail. Maybe GMail has nailed the top spot for webmail, but it looks like Yahoo is ahead on Android. Don't know about iOS apps though, anyone?

Thankfully I don't use these products so the shutdown doesn't personally affect me. The only issue that jumps out is the post went up 4/19 Friday afternoon and the shutdown date is 4/30, including the API. Anyone relying on these services has 7 business days to respond.

"Like we announced last month" (link to post from 01.03)

If you click through, that post announces a different set of services which have now been shut down. "Last Month" was avatars, Yahoo on Blackberry, Clues, App Search, Sports IQ, boards, and Updates API.

That blog post was March 1st and the services shutdown April 1st with the Updates API shutting down April 16th.

oh, right, sorry.

well, pretty irresponsible then. you come back from a short vacation and your data is gone.

This is an important point. Not only should your online services have an easy way for you to get data out of them, but you probably should have a reasonably sane backup schedule, just like you would for hard drives/physical media/etc.

That being said this is a very short amount of time, and hopefully future shutdowns like this at yahoo and other places give more of a warning.

Yahoo engineers may have verified that none of the users of these products have a vacation scheduled in Yahoo Calendar, which will presumably be the last property to shut down, for this reason.

Did anyone notice that a number of the links in the blog post are being routed through Google? (via google.com/url?q=theurl) What's up with that?

Maybe copy & paste of those links from a search results page, without paying attention to what URL actually gets pasted?

Brace yourselves for some posts in the next days...

* "How I've been living with my mail server at home for six months"

* "Yahoo pushed for the use of technology INSERT_TECHNOLOGY_NAME and now they're trying to kill it by closing INSERT_SERVICE_NAME!"

* "Yahoo INSERT_SERVICE_NAME is closing, use INSERT_APP_NAME-ly to replace it (and import your current configuration)."

* "Show HN: This weekend I built an app to replace INSERT_SERVICE_NAME. It will never close, I promise."

I always imagined yahoo kids was profitable for them. maybe disney/angry-birds/whomever are just too dominant?

Upcoming and Yahoo Deals seem like good product ideas for improving personalization for users' local news. Does Yahoo have replacements for these services?

I'm surprised that Yahoo! directory (http://dir.yahoo.com) is not in the gang of six.

Wow, did not realise that a) Yahoo kids existed and b) it was so embarrassingly terrible.

Hmm, think it might be time to get around to backing up my Flickr photos.

Might one say that they are putting more wood behind fewer arrows?

Probably a good call. I had never heard of any of those six.

Upcoming.org was a big deal once upon a time.

Hey Google, this is what it really means to focus.

Yahoo could commit genocide and you idiots would compare it favorably to closing Google reader.

I regret that I have but one up-arrow to click on for this comment.

Google does this annually and they get criticized for it every time. Yahoo does it at the behest of their new ex-Googler CEO and now it's a great idea.

If you say so. The difference is between a company removing something that was actually useful to a lot of people versus a company removing something not that useful to a few people.

Google has lost the trust of plenty of users and because we still don't like their fucking decision, in your words, that makes us idiots. Right...

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