Following a reported four percent staff reduction announced this week, search engine and web portal Yahoo! will also be restructuring its large roster of sites by terminating some, merging others, and turning still others into "features."
According to a presentation slide leaked from an internal Yahoo product meeting on Thursday, Altavista, Yahoo Picks, Yahoo Bookmarks, Yahoo Buzz, Delicious, MyBlogLog, Alltheweb, and MyM are all slated to be shut down for good. Additionally, Yahoo says its Traffic APIs will be shut down as well.
The services FoxyTunes, Yahoo Events, Yahoo People Search, Sideline, FireEagle, and Upcoming are all going to be merged into other Yahoo services.
Finally, Yahoo Deals, Avatars, Alerts, Widgets, Greetings, Babelfish, Calendar, Address Book, Notepad, and Message Boards will become "features." What this means exactly, however, is currently unknown outside of Yahoo.
In a statement to the media, Yahoo said this restructuring effort will help the company "put better focus on our core strengths and fund new innovation in the next year and beyond."
Now that Yahoo's search is powered by Microsoft and Bing, one of the company's core strengths is its participation in the development of the Hadoop software framework.
In Yahoo's second quarter earnings call this year, CEO Carol Bartz said "Hadoop is...behind every click on Yahoo! But it's not just us. Twitter, Facebook, Amazon and the rest of those 1,000 developers I just mentioned also rely on Hadoop. And our approach to Hadoop's development has earned us a lot of admirers, not just for the huge amount of technology expertise needed to build it, but also for making it open source. Technology plays an essential part in what we do. Hadoop and the great talent we've recently added demonstrate how we are elevating science, technology, and innovation even more within the company."
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010
