Yahoo to shutdown a dozen services by September

As the latest of many changes that have been made to Yahoo! under CEO Marissa Mayer’s reign, the company announced via Tumblr that it will be shutting down a dozen services over the new few months, with the last one going down on September 28. This move in part removes services that have received little attention in modern times – some of them perhaps being unknown to most of Internet users – while others are more known. Regardless, the purpose is to do away with the old and draw the company’s users towards a more cohesive, modern Yahoo!.

In every instance, the removed services are replaced with Yahoo!’s current services, leaving users with alternatives that they may or many not be happy with. The first three on the list were slashed today: Yahoo! Axis, Yahoo! Browser Plus, and Citizen Sport. Those who use the Axis plugin will find that it stopped working today, while those using the apps will continue to have access, but they won’t be updated. Citizen Sports users are being directed to Yahoo! Sport, while Browser Plus users are encouraged to check out the company’s developer page for new options.

Yahoo! WebPlayer will go down on June 30, with the player no longer loading. Users are encouraged to remove its code from their websites. The day after that, both FoxyTunes and RSS Alerts will be slashed, with the former being replaced with Yahoo! Music and the latter with Yahoo! Alerts via a Keyword News subscriptions.

Perhaps the most notable service to be taken down is AltaVista, with users being pushed towards Yahoo! Search instead. On the same day – July 8 – Yahoo! Neighbors Beta will also be removed, and users are encouraged to replace it with Yahoo!’s Local Search instead. The last two services to be removed in July are Stars India, replaced with India OMG!, and Downloads Beta, which will switch to only supporting Yahoo! product downloads.

Nothing will be removed in August, oddly enough, with the final two being taken down by the end of September: Yahoo!’s Local API, as well as its online documentation from the developer’s portal, and Term Extraction API, with direct access being replaced with access via YQL. Developers are encouraged to migrate away from this before September 28.

SOURCE: Yahoo!