Yahoo Maps, once one of the most popular mapping solutions on the Internet is being closed down, eight years after it's launch.
Yahoo has long since fallen far behind Google and other competitors and announced that Yahoo Maps is being shut down, along with some other floundering products including Yahoo Pipes, GeoPlanet and PlaceSpotter APIs.
Under the stewardship of Marissa Mayer, Yahoo is concentrating on search, communications and digital content and any products lying outside this remit are at risk of being closed or sold off. The closing of Yahoo Maps was announced in a blog post by Yahoo chief architect Amotz Maimon today, June 4. "We made this decision to better align resources to Yahoo's priorities as our business has evolved since we first launched Yahoo Maps eight years ago," said Maimon.
The maps.yahoo.com site will close at the end of June, but maps that appear in other products such as Yahoo search and Flickr will still be supported.
Google Maps has long been the dominant player in online mapping, but others such as Apple Maps and even Nokia's HERE mapping system have grown larger than Yahoo Maps. Back in 2006 Yahoo Maps actually had more users than Google maps, although online mapping was still in it's infancy. Yahoo then had 20 million unique daily users, 1 million more than Google at the time, whereas these days Google Maps is the world's most popular smartphone app and is used by billions every month.
Maimon also announced the closure of Yahoo Pipes scheduled for the end of August. Yahoo Pipes is a service that let people build custom web applications that could pull in all kinds of data from all over the Internet. When Pipes was launched in 2007 it was hailed as a revolutionary product but it never really gained the popularity among developers that the company had hoped for.
The GeoPlanet and PlaceSpotter APIs that helped developers integrate maps into their applications are also closing down. Additionallly, users of older versions of Apple Macs and iOS devices will no longer be able to sync Yahoo contacts or use Yahoo mail, and Yahoo Music, TV and Movies is closing in certain countries. Full details can be found here.
Yahoo is an old company by Internet standards and as a result has a lot of different product lines that it has tried out as the Internet grew and developed. Since Mayer took over as CEO in 2014 she has been shutting many of these unprofitable products to concentrate on her vision for the future of the company. The Yahoo Directory closed last December, following in the footsteps of Yahoo Message Boards and Yahoo Messenger, so Maps and Pipes are just the latest in a long line of product shutdowns.
