Yahoo Inc. plans on shutting down "under performing" social media such as (search engine) ALTA VISTA as news aggregator BUZZ could be adversely affected and social bookmarking site DELICIOUS announced 12/17/2010 that the site is: "SEARCHING FOR NEW HOME OUTSIDE OF YAHOO".. :Looks down below journal entries for BUZZ:
FROM THE WALL STR. JOURNAL: Yahoo Inc. said it is planning to shut down several "underperforming" and "non-core" Web properties, including the venerable search site AltaVista, as it continues a years-long turnaround effort.
Sites that could be affected by the moves include Delicious, a so-called social bookmarking service, search site AlltheWeb, and online news aggregator Buzz, according to an internal company slide that was posted on the Web on Thursday.
A Yahoo spokeswoman confirmed the veracity of the slide and said the company is evaluating its options for those sites.
"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," the spokeswoman said in a statement.
"We continuously evaluate and prioritize our portfolio of products and services, and do plan to shut down some products in the coming months," she added. "We will communicate specific plans when appropriate."
Yahoo, based in Sunnyvale, Calif., on Tuesday said it was cutting about 600 jobs, or about 4% of its work force. Yahoo had about 14,000 employees at the end of the third quarter of this year.
The Yahoo spokeswoman declined to comment on whether the job cuts were related to the product cuts but said the company is continuing to hire people for other areas of the business, including mobile-device applications.
AltaVista, launched in the mid-1990s, became a popular search engine until Google Inc. and others grabbed much of the market several years later. Yahoo also developed its own search technology but struggled to compete with Google and last year reached a deal with Microsoft Corp.'s Bing search engine to power searches for Yahoo sites.
Other sites among those being considered for closure include MyBlogLog, a social network that Yahoo bought in 2007, according to the internal company presentation--which was published on the Web by a co-founder of MyBlogLog, who has since left Yahoo. The MyBlogLog co-founder, Eric Marcoullier, said in an interview that if he were Yahoo Chief Executive Carol Bartz "I'd probably do the same thing."
After their purchase by Yahoo, sites like MyBlogLog became "little pieces of technology inside Yahoo" and "languished," he said. They often weren't fully integrated with other Yahoo sites and never reached the same scale as popular sites such as the Yahoo homepage, or its media content and email sites, he said. The Yahoo spokeswoman declined to comment.
Yahoo sites get hundreds of millions of unique visitors per month, but the company has been grappling with a slide in how much time people have been spending on its sites, among other issues.
The company's executives have said they would continue investing in applications tailored to mobile devices such as Apple Inc.'s iPad and said Yahoo is also working to better integrate social-networking site Facebook Inc. and microblogging service Twitter Inc. into its sites.
FROM PCMAG.COM and DELICIOUS BLOG 12/17/2010:
Delicious on Friday denied that it was shutting down, and insisted that it was instead shopping for a home outside of Yahoo.
"We are not shutting down Delicious," the company said in a blog post. "While we have determined that there is not a strategic fit at Yahoo, we believe there is a ideal home for Delicious outside of the company where it can be resourced to the level where it can be competitive."
Delicious is currently "exploring a variety of options and talking to companies right now," but the company had few other details.
On Thursday, it was reported that Yahoo would shut down several of its Web properties, including Delicious, Yahoo Buzz, MyBlogLog, and AltaVista. The news came out after MyBlogLog founder Eric Marcoullier tweeted a link to a Yahoo presentation slide that said Yahoo would "sunset" these and other services.
On Friday, Yahoo cross-posted the Delicious blog post on its developer network blog. Blake Irving, executive vice president and chief product officer at Yahoo, also tweeted that Yahoo had been planning to get rid of Delicious for quite some time.
"Reason leaks suck? They're rarely right. This wrong one caused a shit storm. This has been the plan for months," Irving said.
When asked for comment about the slide leak on Thursday, however, a Yahoo spokesperson confirmed that Yahoo does plan "to shut down some products in the coming months such as Yahoo Buzz, our Traffic APIs, and others."
Yahoo acquired MyBlogLog in 2007; Marcoullier is now co-CEO of social network OneTrueFan. Yahoo acquired Delicious in 2005.
On Friday, Delicious said "there's no reason to panic." The service will be maintained and the company encouraged users to keep using it. For those who want to pull their bookmarks from Delicious, the service has an export option and many services allow users to import Delicious links and tags.
"We can only imagine how upsetting the news coverage over the past 24 hours has been to many of you," the company concluded. "Speaking for our team, we were very disappointed by the way that this appeared in the press."
Read more: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703395204576024024258782758.html#ixzz18Kt4Fgjn
Thanks-Stay Metal, Stay Brutal-\m/ -l-
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