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A New Year – A New Yahoo

About a month ago, Yahoo announced that a number of layoffs were taking place in order to trim down and cut expenses. As it turns out, these layoffs were directly related to the downsizing of Yahoo’s current product line. On December 16, news leaked that the company is shutting down a number of products including Yahoo Buzz, MyBlogLog, AllTheWeb.com, Yahoo Picks, AltaVista and the greatly mourned Delicious. This news seems to be rocking the Internet world. Nobody, possibly not even Yahoo, seemed to realize that so many people held their Delicious bookmarks so dearly.

Yahoo released a statement saying “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.” This statement followed the screenshot leak of an internal presentation that outlines which products are going to be killed off, which products are set to be merged and which products are planned to become features.

Just days after the news broke, Yahoo released another statement saying Delicious may not be completely dead. Now Yahoo is contemplating selling the product to a new company. That news marked another turn in the story that further confused Delicious patrons around the world. It is now completely uncertain what will happen to Delicious and the other Yahoo products.

For those of you who are worried about losing your Delicious bookmarks to the depths of the Internet, fear not. Yahoo is prepared to help users export their bookmarks to keep them safe and sound. However, many other properties are quickly cropping up claiming they are the best alternative service to Delicious and people are listening to these claims. Delicious bookmarks are quickly depleting while other services such as Pinboard, Diigo, Evernote and startups such as YourVersion and Springpad are experiencing surges.

Cutting one of the first successful social-web and bookmarking sites is disheartening. With all these new and uncertain changes, we hope for Yahoo’s sake that it will pay off in the end. We’ll be looking for exciting and competitive new products during the next year.

About Amanda Broughton

Amanda Broughton has experience creating and executing digital marketing strategies for a number of diverse businesses and industries. She enjoys every aspect of online marketing from SEO to social media.