Yahoo has been shutting down tons of its products including MyBlogLog and AltaVista and also laying off employees in an attempt to restructure the organization. However, there has been some buzz going around that Yahoo might be shutting down Delicious, one of the most popular bookmarking services in the world.
Now, we have confirmed report that Yahoo will shut down several of its Web properties, including Delicious, Yahoo Buzz, and AltaVista, according to a Yahoo presentation slide that was posted on Twitter. Eric Marcoullier, the co-founder of MyBlogLog — one of the sites purportedly affected by the shutdown — tweeted a picture of what appears to be a presentation slide from a Yahoo products all hands presentation, dividing various Yahoo web products into “Sunset,” “Merge,” and “Make Feature.” The news comes one day after Yahoo slashed 4 percent of its workforce, or roughly 600 employees.
Other services that are going be shut down include Yahoo Picks, AlltheWeb.com, Yahoo Bookmarks, and MyBlogLog. The slide in question, posted by MyBlogLog founder Eric Marcoullier, shows three rows labeled sunset, merge, and make feature. The aforementioned services were listed under sunset; services under merge include Fire Eagle, Upcoming, Sideline, FoxyTunes, Yahoo Events, and Yahoo People Search.
Yahoo’s Chief Product Officer and Executive Vice President Blake Irving seems to have all but confirmed the authenticity of Marcoullier’s slide with a threat to fire whoever leaked it. The tweet reads – “@bpm140 @joshu Really dude? Can’t wait to find out how you got the web cast. Whoever it is, gone!”
When contacted, here is what was received as the the official response from Yahoo:
“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.”
For all we know, this PR statement is synonymous to saying -“Yes, you’ve the correct information. We are going to shut down all of those reported web properties“!
If this is for real, the sunset of Delicious is the biggest shock on the list. While it isn’t the dominant Web 2.0 force it was when it launched in 2003, it still has an active userbase, and the Delicious blog shows that Yahoo has been continually upgrading aspects of the service, with a posting as recent as December 9th. Closing Delicious could be one of the biggest mistakes made by Yahoo and there is no way that regular users are going to take this news lightly. I for one am appalled at the way Yahoo is dealing with this.
HOW TO BACKUP YOUR DELICIOUS BOOKMARKS:
Now if you are an active Delicious user, we expect you already know how to export your bookmarks. Those who don’t know how to export your Delicious bookmarks and wondering how to do it, you just need to visit this link. And after logging in, you can export all the bookmarks you’ve made in form of an HTML File. Go do it when the Delicious site is still functioning.
Update: Britta Gustafson, formerly a Delicious team member, responds to a “please explain” thread in Delicious’ forums as such: “Unfortunately there are no team members left to explain – they were laid off on Tuesday, according to what they’ve said on Twitter.” Gustafson claims to be posting as “a user with no special knowledge.”
Update2: A #savedelicious campaign has sprung up among Delicious users who don’t want to see the service killed off.
