Renowned Web portal Yahoo.com continues along the path of trimming non-strategic properties from its portfolio by terminating the existence of four services. The list includes Shine, a women's lifestyle site; Xobni, a contact-management application; the editorial site Yahoo Voices and a people-finding search engine. These business units will be shuttered by the end of this month.
These moves are in keeping with Yahoo's corporate strategy of focusing its efforts into four core businesses - communications, digital magazines, search and video - or as Jay Rossiter, Yahoo's senior VP of the Cloud Platform Group stated, "making the world's daily habits more inspiring and entertaining." The company will excise their least profitable and popular sites and services first, in many cases adding some of their functionalities to Yahoo products that will remain available.
A brief history of Yahoo's other cuts within the past few months includes the end of Newlook Service - an online virtual makeover tool for maktoob.yahoo.com; removing the ability for users to generate research reports on Yahoo Finance; the closing of Bookmarks.yahoo.com - this bookmark storage site has been replaced by adding its functionality to Yahoo Toolbar for Firefox and Internet Explorer - and Yahoo Toolbar is no longer available for Chrome, due to changes in Google policy. It is being replaced with Yahoo Extension for Chrome. The Yahoo Toolbar for Chrome product will be gone from the Chrome Web store by July 22.
Also to be assumed into pixel heaven is the Yahoo Contributor Network.
With Xobni (inbox spelled backwards), which was purchased by Yahoo only one year ago, the company is incorporating Xobni-like features into Yahoo Mail, such as compose auto-suggest and people-centric mail search; the company will also borrow snippets of code and technology from the Xobni app to grace future new Yahoo products.
Yahoo Shine will be shut down at the end of this month. In its place will be several new digital magazines that will cross over into Shine territory. Current webzines Yahoo Beauty and Yahoo Travel will also pick up Shine's slack.
"By focusing our energy on Yahoo's four core areas - Search, Communications, Digital Magazines and Video - and the two incredible engines that power them, Flickr and Tumblr, we can make a bigger impact on the things people do everyday," said Rossiter.
