
Yahoo shuts down six products - shill
http://ycorpblog.com/2013/04/19/355356/
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soupboy
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.

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tekacs
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>

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webwanderings
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.

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tekacs
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. :)

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revelation
Error 999 Copyright © 2006 Yahoo!

\---

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

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justinwr
People used Yahoo in 2006?

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jlgaddis
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.

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dbecker
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?"

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smackfu
Verge article, since it seems dead:
[http://www.theverge.com/2013/4/19/4243852/yahoo-shuts-
down-d...](http://www.theverge.com/2013/4/19/4243852/yahoo-shuts-down-deals-
kids-upcoming-and-more-in-attempt-to-focus)

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.

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

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dave5104
Yahooligans was my elementary school computer classes! :(

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booruguru
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.

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jmathai
It's part of the dysfunction.

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drewmclellan
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.

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ajitk
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?

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timdorr
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.

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onemorepassword
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.

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spullara
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.

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andrewljohnson
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.

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babuskov
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?

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parfe
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.

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

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parfe
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.

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zalew
oh, right, sorry.

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

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aray
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.

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dave5104
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?

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

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joshguthrie
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."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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guyzero
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.

