One thing Yahoo has been very good at over the past year is closing down services. Today brings news of another one shutting down: Yahoo Gallery. Come July 14, it will be no more.
Yahoo Gallery was a project that never left beta testing. It was intended to showcase cool applications that were built using Yahoo’s various services and APIs. And while it was a decent idea as a way to show off cool things like Flickr apps, it never really took off. Here’s Yahoo’s explanation message about the shuttering:
Yahoo! Gallery will be shutting down on July 14, 2009.
After careful consideration, we have decided to close the Yahoo! Gallery beta service. Although the Gallery gained a core of loyal users who enjoyed the service, Yahoo! has been reprioritizing some products to help us deliver the best possible experiences to consumers and developers. The decision to close the gallery is part of this larger strategy and will allow us to focus on helping our customers develop engaging applications using Yahoo! technologies.
If you have submitted any applications, you can go to the My Applications page, then download any images or text descriptions you wish to save.
The sentence, “The decision to close the gallery is part of this larger strategy and will allow us to focus on helping our customers develop engaging applications using Yahoo! technologies” doesn’t seem to make much sense. Isn’t that exactly what Gallery was supposed to highlight? But whatever — Deadpool, it is.
Gallery’s closing follows the much bigger decision to shutter Geocities earlier this year. And Yahoo officially shuttered Yahoo 360 last month, and Jumpcut shut down two days ago.
[photo: flickr/marshall astor]
[thanks Akash]
flag flies at half-staff
Even if it flies at top of staff, who cares? Yahoo! Gallery was just Yahoo’s exhibition showcase. They wanted to showoff to the world their apps and now they have nothing to do but shutdown.
MSFT should still snap em up
Good bye and good riddens.
Yahoo! are starting to realise that they are providing too much and are closing services down like Yahoo! Gallery amongst other services but they are providing too many services
So basically they hired a new CEO who sold everything… why not just put yahoo on ebay and sell it for oodles of cash… Yahoo the Kmart of the tech world..
not sold..closed it down..
Funny you should mention them selling everything though: http://www.tech...s-on-the-cheap/
I don’t pretend to know a lot about this stuff.. but what is the strategy behind this? Why would you sell assets when the market is the lowest? From what I have read Yahoo is still a profitable company.. wouldn’t it make sense to simple make it through the tough times and then sell when things get better?
Yahoo has a lot of initiatives, but they don’t have the persistence to make it a success. I wish they invested in just a few things, but with all their passion. I hope they change the way they do business in the near future.
CEOs gotta do what a CEOs gotta do. Was a good idea when it could be supported financially. Under the circumstances not possible.
That would make sense if Gallery were a big, expensive site. But it costs virtually nothing to run. So that can only mean two things: 1) Yahoo is turning away from their commitment to openness established under previous CEOs; 2) They are planning something like Gallery but different (like an App Store).
Cost wasn’t the reason why this site was shut down, though. (And I say this as the guy who led the team that built this site.)
wow
doubt
while bartz was busy oiling her chainsaw, yahoo continued its journey into irrelevance as balmer flipped the final F-YOU by rolling out bing instead of buying ysearch. in six months yahoo will be number three in a two horse race
my guess is that the biggest cuts at y! are still on deck…this company is headed for 5k headcount. with facebook holding the #4 position in traffic with one sixth the employees, one wonders how long this whale can stay so fat
Leaner and meaner. Yahoo has a lot of brain power. Keep cutting the dead limbs and come back stronger Bartz!
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What is this bizarre verb “shutter” that you keep using? I’ve seen services closed, or shut, but the only thing I know about shutter is that its a noun and generally applies to cameras or windows (real physical ones)
I’m surprised you didn’t manage to sneak in “Going forward” and other pieces of bureacraptic buzzspeak as well.
Yahoo! are clearly doing the right thing and are streamlining their operation to focus on the products that are number 1. After don’t Yahoo! still have the number 1 email, photo, news and financial sites on the internet right now?
Yahoo! is far from fat and far from irrelevant. Bing is nice test for Microsoft which I’m sure has both Google and Yahoo! concerned, but the market share impacted the most by Bing is clearly Google’s traffic not Yahoo!s. Yahoo! is clearly getting ready for / in the process of a major change in focus.
“One thing Yahoo has been very good at over the past year is closing down services.”
LOL
Yahoo is ice cold, even their commercials earlier this year were bad
I was using Yahoo’s email for nearly 9yrs and one day I just snapped from all of the spam I was getting. So I moved to gmail and the difference night and day. I wished I moved to gmail sooner. Yahoo mail is garbage. As much as I want them to succeed, they need to do something to get back on their feet.