Shut It Down: Yahoo! Shutters Delicious, MyBlogLog, Buzz and More

We suspect Yahoo! really doesn’t get how this whole holiday thing works. The company handed out pink slips to almost 600 employee just a few days ago, and now a slide from an all-hands meeting at the company shows that some once promising acquisitions and products are getting the axe.

On the chopping block: shared bookmarking service Delicious, which in spite of Yahoo’s handling has a loyal userbase; MyBlogLog, a community based around the blogs people read; Yahoo! Buzz, a Digg competitor that encouraged voting on stories; numerous other Yahoo! products that have passed their sell-by dates including Bookmarks and Picks; and search engines you probably forgot existed like All the Web and AltaVista. {TechCrunch}

While there probably aren’t many people who will miss the last batch, lots of people are voicing their sadness over the decision to see Delicious go, and to a lesser extent MyBlogLog.

Yahoo’s official word on the matter confirmed that product reductions are on the horizon.

“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.

We continuously evaluate and prioritize our portfolio of products and services, and do plan to shut down some products in the coming months such as Yahoo! Buzz, our Traffic APIs, and others. We will communicate specific plans when appropriate.”

At this rate, Yahoo’s going to be firing the yellow smiley face and cutting one of the Os to streamline.

Which is really a bit sad considering that people do still use Delicious, and those who like digging into web data have relied on Yahoo’s more open (than Google) information for years. Especially considering the years of curated data for website preferences that Delicious offers, we really hope that at least one of the services on that list is able to find a new home somewhere else.