Following Layoffs, Yahoo Cuts Products: MyBlogLog, Delicious, Yahoo! Buzz

December 16, 2010 at 11:58 am PT

At an all-hands meeting for the Yahoo product team following a round of layoffs yesterday that significantly impacted that group, Chief Product Officer Blake Irving showed off a slide of plans to “sunset” eight products and consolidate others.

Products on a list to be sunsetted–whatever that means–include MyBlogLog, Yahoo! Picks, AltaVista, Yahoo! Bookmarks, Yahoo! Buzz and Delicious. Some of those properties came from acquisitions and others were internally generated.

The news of the Yahoo plans first came out via a screenshot of the Webcast posted on Twitter by Eric Marcoullier that included a slide with a list of impacted products next to an image of Irving, along with EVP of the Americas Ross Levinsohn, announcing the news.

Marcoullier was founder of MyBlogLog, which created one of the products being shut down. (MyBlogLog was bought by Yahoo in 2007 and has been pretty much neglected ever since.)

The slide also shows plans to merge additional products, including Fire Eagle and Yahoo People Search, and make features out of many others, including Yahoo! Alerts and Yahoo! Calendar. (If you have better eyes than I do, please help identify some of those logos in the comments.)

Marcoullier is no longer at Yahoo, although the validity of his Webcast screenshot was confirmed, after he was quickly criticized on Twitter by various current Yahoo employees who didn’t appreciate it getting out, including Irving himself, who insinuated he would fire whoever leaked the Webcast. (Click on image here to enlarge.)

While the layoffs and shutdowns obviously indicate a de-emphasis of technology products by Yahoo, they aren’t necessarily unwarranted. Some of these products were the same as those mentioned on then-SVP Brad Garlinghouse’s infamous Peanut Butter Memo way back in 2006 as candidates for streamlining.

Update 12:21 p.m. PT: Yahoo’s statement on the matter just came through:

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.

In response to a follow-up question about Delicious, which seems to be the “sunsetted” product people are most upset about, the spokeswoman replied:

“We continue to operate Delicious today, and will communicate specific details when appropriate.”

Tagged with: acquisitions, Alerts, All Hands, AltaVista, Blake Irving, bookmarks, Brad Garlinghouse, Buzz, calendar, consolidate, del.icio.us, Eric Marcoullier, Fire Eagle, internal, investment, layoffs, Liz Gannes, logos, meeting, memo, MyBlogLog, NetworkEffect, off-strategy, peanut butter, People Search, Picks, product, products, Ross Levinsohn, screenshot, shutdown, sunset, team, underperforming, Webcast, Yahoo

comments so far. Add yours.

Anonymous

Wow…..such a great wsj ‘tech journalist’ aka kara, lives off scraps thrown from the yahoo desk.

woohoo……..Way to go Kara!!!
http://113tidbits.com tonyknuckles

MBL was in the toilet before Yahoo got its hands on it – really bad network full of spam devils and bots galore. Delicious was too awkward to understand
http://pithagora.com fjpoblam

Utterly amazing they’re cutting Delicious. Though it was awkward for some to understand, it was still a useful tool for some of us to organize many bookmarks across several browsers until things such as the more sleek xmarks came along… Hard times at Yahoo! Is Flickr next?
http://twitter.com/tsupasat tsupasat

Oh man … this sucks. Is there any way to download or port our bookmarks on de.licio.us to another service?
http://twitter.com/worldofhiglet worldofhiglet

I use Delicious and MyBlogLog daily. Delicious in particular had massive potential and I was advising students to use it as a bookmarking service they could use anywhere. This is terrible news.
http://thislooksfamiliar.tumblr.com thislooksfamiliar

My thought exactly. I used delicious extensively until xmarks (then firemarks) came out and had such nice browser integration that delicious couldn’t pull off.

Flickr is pretty much the only thing Yahoo does right and even that could use more social integration. the rest of their products struggle to stay relevant nevermind cutting edge.
Anonymous

Many librarians, public and academic, have utilized de.licio.us by pulling the tags into online subject guides and use the site as a way of collecting subject specific websites and offer to their students and faculty as a reference tool. Please say it isn’t so.
Anonymous

All of this is very unfortunate, but to be honest, I’d never even heard of MyBlogLog or Buzz.

de.licio.us is really a tragedy; it was the first really useful web-based bookmarking and tagging system.

Perhaps it’s best for Yahoo to let go of what it can’t handle… and think about working with what it has now.
http://twitter.com/eileencan Eileen B

Yes, big blow. As soon as I saw this news I exported my bookmarks…you can get an HTML version pretty easily through the “Help” menu. I hope someone will offer a similar service and we can all just upload our data. I use Delicious all-day every day. RIP little tag icon.
http://twitter.com/eileencan Eileen B

My mother taught me never to complain about free food. But, really, I will miss Delicious very, very much and this is really bad news.
http://twitter.com/superflush Eli S.

Liz, you know you can zoom in on the photo, right?

The feature list:
Inquisitor
All preceded by Yahoo: Deals, Avatars, Alerts, Widgets, Greatings, Babel Fish, Calendar, Address Book, Notepad, Message Boards
http://twitter.com/mrpaladin Chris Kemp

Delicious was one of the wonders of the modern world. I would not at all be surprised to see someone (Google?) pick it up
http://michaelkpate.com Michael K Pate

I am stunned Even when I read about the layoffs yesterday, I never considered Delicious would be in danger. As SoCalLibrarian points out, it isn’t even about the functionality – shutting it down is going to leave a black hole in the internet of lost content of monumental proportions. And if Yahoo drives away the more technically inclined Internet users in hope of reaching out to some intangible mainstream, let me point out that strategy has never worked effectively for anyone who ever tried it.
http://intlv.tumblr.com/ Intl V

Yahoo should just go ahead and sell off every single thing they own and shut down completely. They’re the biggest joke of a company I’ve ever seen. You name it, they’ve done it, from buying well-performing internet start-ups and turning them into failing disasters, to turning civilians over to communist governments. The only thing they haven’t been able to do is turn a profit. This is the point where corporate suicide becomes a viable option. I’m just glad they didn’t get their hands on YouTube or Twitter first!
http://www.facebook.com/people/Kimberly-McKinnis/513369752 Kimberly McKinnis

curl https://:@api.del.icio.us/v1/posts/all > bookmarks.xml
Anonymous

“The only thing they haven’t been able to do is turn a profit.” Umm.. actually, they turn a very nice profit. They have hundreds of millions in the bank with a beautiful balance sheet.

They are #1 in nearly every content area that they focus on, yet you still seem to think they should just give up just because they aren’t as good at Search as Google or as good at Social as Facebook?

This silly rhetoric is so old.
http://www.facebook.com/people/Kimberly-McKinnis/513369752 Kimberly McKinnis

what if it’s food you’re actually willing to pay for? ;) i pay for flickr, and i would pay for delicious.
http://mekk.waw.pl/mk/index Mekk

I would be fairly glad to pay sth to keep delicious runing.

Any chances somebody buys it from Yahoo and continue operating? Diigo is not bad but I got so used to delicious….
Anonymous

check out pinboard.in imports delicious just fine and very similar in functionality.
Anonymous

I don’t get what is/was hard to understand about delicious. It’s bookmarking, tagging, sharing, filtering by multiple tags, adding notes to bookmarks – simple and straight forward. Digg obviously improved on the idea, which Yahoo missed out on – like so many things.
Anonymous

As a 6th grade teacher, I have found delicious very helpful for creating a type of web resource list. Tags help separate different subjects, chapters and content to make links easy to navigate and find. I would be terribly bummed if all my work just disappeared.
Anonymous

See tsupasat’s posting and responses above on how to -if necessary- retrieve your delicious bookmarks.

What a shame seeing them (potentially) going.
http://www.advancedwebads.com/ Mel Webads

So what will happen with current users of this soon to be closed websites? I know some friends who are loyal users of mybloglog and they had been there since the start. I guess they should advise their users to migrate their blogs to other sites.
Anonymous

Wow, what a bummer, I will miss delicious!

http://www.internet-privacy.edu.tc
Anonymous

Favbot does automatic import and free hosting for Delicious bookmarks. Once imported, you can use your bookmarks just like before except with a small change in the url http://www.favbot.com/import-delicious.html

You should check out the other features of Favbot too : http://www.favbot.com/ – it makes manual bookmarking obsolete, actually. The tool automatically bookmarks for you.
http://pagedo.com/ Matthew Ogston (PageDo)

Absolutely shocked that they’re closing down Delicious… But on the plus side i’ve just migrated my 3,000 bookmarks to Diigo in under 2 minutes.

Diigo is actually a much better service – can’t believe i’ve not been using Diigo until today. Has loads of extra stuff like integrated sharing (twitter, facebook, buzz, email) + support highlighting and annotation of text.

Chrome extension is much more powerful than the equivalent for Delicious. I think Yahoo have actually done me a favour :)
http://www.facebook.com/amnichols Anne-Marie Barnett Nichols

Back in the day MyBlogLog was a very cool way to get stats on your blog and start a community list. It was obvious that once Yahoo! bought it, they neglected it and pushed it aside.
http://twitter.com/EmailTrayNews Allen MacCannell

I have a question:

How about Yahoo Hosting Services? Will they be promoting this profit center going forward? Will they be losing managers there?