Yahoo announced earlier this week that it was trimming its staff by 4%, something nobody likes to hear just before Christmas, but it followed this up with plans to axe eight of its website properties in a streamlining effort. Of these eight properties, the bookmarking website Delicious is the highest profile.
The axing of Delicious, and the other seven website properties, wasn’t officially announced by Yahoo – instead it was leaked from a slide used in a presentation meeting. The other websites to be cut in addition to Delicious are MyBlogLog, Altavista, Alltheweb, MyM, Yahoo Buzz, Yahoo Picks and Yahoo Bookmarks.
Yahoo also plans to shut down the Traffic APIs.
MyBlogLog is a social networking website for bloggers, where blogs are registered and visits to other users’ blogs are tracked. Yahoo bought MyBlogLog in 2007 when it was a fairly active community website. Since then its user base has dwindled, probably due in no small part to the success of Twitter.
Altavista is perhaps the saddest victim of these cuts, as the search engine predates Google (being founded in 1995) and was once one of the big players in the search field. Now that Yahoo’s search is powered by Bing, it has no need of its own search properties, which means Altavista is surplus to requirements.
This news is particularly bad for the core users of websites such as Delicious and MyBlogLog who, at the time, must have been sceptical of Yahoo’s interests in them, despite the tens of millions of dollars paid for them. The scepticism was proved right.
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