With a new quarter amongst us Yahoo has decided to do a bit of cleaning up – much like Google once did – and have announced the closure of several services. Yahoo Education, Qwiki and Directory, which will get shut down in the next few months, allowing the company to focus on different projects.
Yahoo Education is the first to go – today (September 30th) being it’s final day. The site was designed to help connect education providers with content, which doesn’t seem to be among the company’s top priorities at the moment.
“As we take a close look at our offerings, we identify areas outside of our core experiences where users’ needs are already well served by alternative online resources. For this reason, on September 30, we will close Yahoo Education, a site designed to connect users with education providers and content,” Yahoo writes about this the shutdown of this particular feature.
Qwiki is next in line with the last day it’s going to be used set on November 1. The app has been acquired by Yahoo back in July 2013 and it was expected to be left alone for at least a while longer. Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem to be the case and the tool that can create short movies based on events from a user’s camera is getting shut down. Unlike many other services Yahoo acquired, this one has already lived a long life, as the company commonly shuts down the startups it buys and integrates the teams within its own.
“The Qwiki team will continue to innovate on new digital media experiences for Yahoo users,” the company notes and invites users to download content created via Qwiki.
Lastly, and most important to me and other old school webmasters – is the shut down of the Yahoo Directory. The Yahoo Directory will be retired on December 31. As the name suggests, the service provides users with a list of websites organized into various different categories. The Yahoo Directory has long been loved and hated by webmasters. Some may even call it historic – after-all it was the very first human edited search engine – and the basis for what Yahoo came from.
“While we’re committed to connecting users with the information they’re passionate about, our business has evolved and at the end of 2014, we will retire the Yahoo Directory. Advertisers will be upgraded to a new service,” Yahoo said, although it didn’t give additional details aside from saying that advertisers will be hearing from them directly.