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Yahoo! Businesses

Yahoo Killing Maps, Pipes & More 176

Posted by samzenpus from the so-long dept.
alphadogg writes: Yahoo is shutting down its mapping service, Pipes and reducing the availability of Yahoo TV and Yahoo Music. The company has decided instead to focus on three major parts of its business: search, communications, and digital content. "We made this decision to better align resources to Yahoo's priorities as our business has evolved since we first launched Yahoo Maps eight years ago," says the company.
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Yahoo Killing Maps, Pipes & More More

Yahoo Killing Maps, Pipes & More

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  • It's going to be painful... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by bobbied ( 2522392 ) on Thursday June 04, 2015 @07:04PM (#49843693)

    To watch Yahoo slowly die because they got out classed by all the upstarts in the market.

    Really, they fell prey to the PHB effect before their competitors did. MBA's took over too fast at Yahoo after the founders took their money and ran...

    • To watch Yahoo slowly die because they got out classed by all the upstarts in the market.

      yeah those upstarts like Google? Google hasn't been an upstart for a very long time.

      • Re:It's going to be painful... (Score:4, Insightful)

        by bobbied ( 2522392 ) on Thursday June 04, 2015 @08:04PM (#49844169)

        They got taken over by MBA's too after the founders took their money and ran...

        Facebook and Twitter are next....

      • Re:It's going to be painful... (Score:5, Insightful)

        by ron_ivi ( 607351 ) <sdotno@cheapcomp ... s.com minus poet> on Thursday June 04, 2015 @09:22PM (#49844719)

        MBA's took over too fast at Yahoo after the founders took their money and ran...

        Even a bit worse than that --- after they watched AOL buy Time Warner they wanted to emulate that they hired some Warner Brothers guy as their CEO who didn't know much about the internet. And they never invest in the technologies they have. Consider all the times they aquired the leading company in a space --- only to *not* invest in it and kill it:

        • Broadcast.com - that Yahoo bought for ~$4 billion - was the leading audio/video site of its time, and could have been Youtube + Hulu + Netflix
        • Geocities.com - that Yahoo bought for ~3 billion - was the leading social network of its time - could have been MySpace+Facebook
        • Egroups - for a half a billion - another social network component.
        • del.icio.us - another social network component
        • Altavista as part of Overture - that Yahoo bought for i-forget-how-much - was the leading search engine of it's time - and yahoo doesn't even use them, preferring to pay competitors for search results.
        • MusicMatch - that coulda been Pandora.

        And such irony that they *now* descide to focus on Search --- after having bought what was once the best search engine on the internet (AltaVista), yet have since then been paying competitors to do search for them.

        • Re:It's going to be painful... (Score:5, Insightful)

          by mrchaotica ( 681592 ) * on Thursday June 04, 2015 @09:58PM (#49844871)

          Not to mention, that "Pipes" thing actually looks pretty cool... too bad they never marketed it, so I didn't know it existed until after they decided to shut it down!

          • It was very "set it and forget it" and didn't require authentication to keep using RSS feeds created with it. I have no idea if I'm using it every day or not. I know that I had been at one time.

        • Re:It's going to be painful... (Score:4, Insightful)

          by Alomex ( 148003 ) on Thursday June 04, 2015 @10:23PM (#49845043) Homepage

          But you forgot to add that they refused to pay 1 million for Larry and Sergei's search engine.... which forced them to go on their own and create Google.

          How's that for a fscked corporate M&A department?

        • Egroups - for a half a billion - another social network component.

          Didn't they incorporate that into Yahoogroups or something? It's been so long that I can't remember.

          MusicMatch - that coulda been Pandora.

          Oh yeah, I had that on XP, liked it well enough that I actually paid money to upgrade the thing to pro. Had an internet radio feature that worked fairly well. I think you could even buy songs in it, besides that Spotify/pandora-ish subscription thing. The Interface wasn't too bad either. Personally I think Internet radio didn't take off because back then it was tied to the computer, which often didn't have

        • Was GeoCities really much of a "social network"? I had a site on it in the late 90s and I only remember it as a place to dump my HTML files. I guess some people tricked out their page with guestbooks - which IIRC was always done through a third party by embedding a frame in your page. But the functionality of even the most dynamic Geocities page was not equivalent to Facebook or Myspace. At least that I remember - if they tried adding that type of stuff later on, let me know.

          • It's a social network in the sense that it served as the equivalent of your "profile" page on Facebook now. That's really the only common thread I can find, but it is probably the 90's equivalent at least for that small (mostly non-social) part.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by kamapuaa ( 555446 )

      Yahoo was done down by sloppy engineering. Everybody went to Yahoo for first the curated internet and later (when that proved impossible) internet searches, and the internet searches were terrible. Later Google came along, their results actually good, and there was a sudden migration to a site which could actually get shit done.

      I don't know if MBAs helped or hurt Yahoo's case, but ultimately they were just swapping deck chairs on the Titanic. There's no possible way a site with shitty search results coul

      • Yahoo was done down by sloppy engineering. ... There's no possible way a site with shitty search results could compete with a site with good search results.

        Not just search. Their maps were crappy and rarely updated. Their email doesn't even have basic features like sub-folders, although they first promised to add them 18 years ago. Their services are so bad, that I have heard some employers will reject resumes [brazencareerist.com] coming from @yahoo.com, presumably because anyone using Yahoo is too dumb to hire.

        • It is my impression that Yahoo email accounts are compromised and used to send spam far more often than other services. This could be due to one of 3 reasons:
          1. Yahoo has more email subscribers than competing services.
          2. X-site scripting vulnerabilities in Yahoo.
          3. More clueless users.

          I don't think that the magnitude of 1 is large enough, so options 2 and 3 are left. I think that there were some cross-site scripting vulnerabilities reported a year or two back, so it might be this.

          • 4. Weak password and/or high password reuse are enough to get you hijacked, and Yahoo doesn't lock you out or require a mobile phone number like microsoft and gmail do.

            This is a good feature by the way. They tried to get me to provide a phone member, and to convert my account to a "social media" one but it was easily clicked through and they stopped buggering me about it.
            So, you get long term webmail that doesn't lock you out. Your webmail can be locked if hijacked, but this can be recovered after a waiting

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Khyber ( 864651 )

        "as a PC shop guy who deals with home users every day I can tell you the #1 home page I see on folks computers is Yahoo."

        That's likely because Mozilla partnered with Yahoo recently, and not done by conscious choice.

  • Yahoo has maps? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 04, 2015 @07:04PM (#49843695)

    Who knew?

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Yahoo maps is actually really nice. It is somehow one of the only map services that has a scale bar. I continue to be baffled by Google leaving this out. What the hell is the point of a map without a scale bar?

      • I have not once wanted to use a scale bar. Really you want to know how long it takes, or how many miles it takes, and it does that. If for some reason Google Maps stopped telling you this information automatically, then yeah I guess a scale bar would be a good way to estimate the same information,

        • Really you want to know how long it takes, or how many miles it takes

          So, um, like, that's what a scale bar TELLS YOU. Without having to click "directions". Especially for walking directions.

          • And, especially, the maps where I most want this are embedded (e.g. in a hotel side where I want to see how far the hotel is from the places I actually want to go) and so don't provide access to the directions bar.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by xaxa ( 988988 )

          The scale bar is very useful in unfamiliar countries. Is the next building to my hotel is 2km away, or 200m, or 20m? Can I walk to the beach?

          It's much quicker to look at a scale than to ask for directions, especially when I don't know what the destinations are called.

          • A scale bar would be pretty useless in those circumstances, unless you were flying. The hotel may be 200m from the beach as the crow flies, but if the only way to get there is via a footpath that is 1km long then you will be walking five times the distance. The walking directions you can get on Google/Bing maps are much more useful at telling you the actual practical distance between two locations

      • Google Maps has one... lower right corner, after the "report a problem" link

      • I agree with this comment on the scale bar. apple maps also has a scale bar, but for whatever reason it only shows you the scale bar when you're resizing the map. once you're done pinching to zoom, the bar fades away.

      • Bah - Yahoo's dumping their maps just about the same time that Google's been making Google Maps much less usable, at least on browsers. Not only does it take a lot longer to load the map of where it thinks you are before it's willing to listen to you type what you really want a map of, it's been getting much harder to actually display directions even after that. For instance, if you want to go from A to B, it shows you a short abstract of the directions, and lets you click on parts to expand them. But you

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by antdude ( 79039 )

      My king ant used it. :/

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by DiEx-15 ( 959602 )

      Who knew?

      When I read the title in my Yahoo Mail I was like "Why is Google shutting it down? Has Skynet become sentient now and wants to confuse humanity without maps?!"

      Then 'i realized it was Yahoo and not Google and then was like "Oh. Nevermind. When did they have Maps and what the hell are Pipes?"

      I need to enact a rule not to read anything until I've downed at least my first pot of coffee in the morning.

  • interesting (Score:3)

    by lucm ( 889690 ) on Thursday June 04, 2015 @07:06PM (#49843703)

    The company has decided instead to focus on three major parts of its business: search, communications, and digital content.

    So that's what Yahoo does. I wondered what was their business besides unreliable email and annoying CEOs.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      I did not know there were Yahoo Maps?

      I thought they were just email and in the past a search engine.

      Well, listen, and learn something new everyday.

  • Yahoo Should... (Score:5, Funny)

    by MightyMartian ( 840721 ) on Thursday June 04, 2015 @07:07PM (#49843711) Journal

    Yahoo should concentrate on figuring out who will be the last person out of the building, so they can make sure to turn off the lights.

  • Uhm (Score:2)

    by Eyezen ( 548114 )
    ...reducing the availabilty of TV and Music ...instead focus on digital content

  • yahoo mail is barely usable at all any more, and it is so full of spam...

    the usability has reached a new low, and I think they must be selling targeted email, because I get so much stuff that is obviously spam that it is ridiculous.

    Had I not been using yahoo mail pretty much since it was announced in 1997, and I still have people who only know me at that address, I would not use it at all.

    Maybe it is time...

    • My only issue with Yahoo mail is the number of permissions the current Mobile app version wants. If I ever switch phones the Yahoo app goes way, I will not give them more permissions. I already ditched the Yahoo Finance app for privacy reasons. That I can live without since Yahoo Finance now sucks and isn't likely to return. Really Porter Stansbury and his end of the world predictions on the front page of Yahoo finance, meh, get off my lawn*.

      *Due to drought conditions visitors will now have to get of my dir

    • I have two (2) Yahoo! emails that I have paid for since 2002 and they work very well.

      I have 17 free Yahoo! email accounts and the ones I never actually even used are good spam magnets and stuff.

    • YOUR account is full of spam.

      Mine is not. Remember you can unsubscribe and block emails.

  • Pipes was actually useful (Score:3, Interesting)

    by afaiktoit ( 831835 ) on Thursday June 04, 2015 @07:20PM (#49843799)
    its like companies want RSS to die or something.

    • It was basically the thing people used for an RSS widget after Google Reader discontinued their service, right? It's true that RSS has taken a beating the past number of years.

    • I used to use iGoogle heavily with feeds from Pipes, then Marissa Mayer spearheaded a redesign to to cater to the "real" users (gadget creators) as part of a monetization strategy. I figured that with her move to Yahoo, she'd quit strangling projects I rely on. I guess it was only a matter of time.

    • I use Yahoo Pipes to "repair" RSS feeds that only have one-line summaries and replace them with the whole article. Does anyone know of an alternate that does the same?

  • Just die...

  • They should hire Abe Vigoda [wikipedia.org] to do ads for them.

  • Thank you internet Jesus (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    For killing off the unholy spawn that was Yahoo Maps. I keep our web information up to date with the major players out there, and by far and away the absolute WORST to deal with was Yahoo Maps. Bing Maps? Not as bad by even half. Google Maps? We're stuck with them, but at least you can call someone for help on the really stupid problems. Yelp? Same.

    But OH GOD is dealing with problems on Yahoo Maps a pain. Can't die soon enough.

  • noooo! not pipes! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 04, 2015 @07:38PM (#49843959)

    I use pipes every single day in bash. What are we supposed to do now, redirect everything into a temporary file, like in the early days? That gets cumbersome with many steps, and anyway it is less multi-processor efficient, and CPUs have more than one core these days!

  • Yahoo decided software engineering is too hard and decided to just hire a bunch of writers.

  • I didn't even know Yahoo had a maps service. I knew they had a TV service that I never used but otherwise I had heard of none of these services. I'm interested how "search" is still a major part of it's business. Isn't it just now regurgitated bing results?

  • flickr is the only service yahoo should focus on. In fact they should rename themselves to flickr and remove the annoying yahoo toolbar on the top of the page.

  • I was using Yahoo maps before Google maps, and I've been using Google maps a lot longer than 8 years.

    • Yahoo rebranded MapQuest early on and then switches to a different provider before bringing maps in house 8 years ago.

      -Chris

  • Since Google has started disabling the old version of Maps i have seen people suggest Yahoo Maps as a good choice to move to for those who thing the new Google Maps is too slow and painful. That probably wouldn't add enough new users for them to justify keeping it, but it's still a little sad for anyone who just recently decided that Yahoo was the right place to move to for maps.

    (I didn't go that route myself because i dislike having the entire browser window covered with the map, so i'm thinking of movin
  • I like Yahoo Groups because it provides a functional interface w/reasonable features to several niche hardware/software vendors/authors and interest areas - all w/a single login and all available in the same browser window. What's annoying is that many vendor Groups are moving to their own little custom forums w/unique interfaces and more bells and whistles than is necessary. Add multiple passwords/windows and it's typically more hassle than it's worth for casual access to see what's going on in the user co

  • Okay, why are you all being so tough on Yahoo? (Score:5, Funny)

    by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Thursday June 04, 2015 @08:18PM (#49844263)

    Okay, sure, they're in a tough spot. None of us knew they even had maps, their email sucks, and nobody wants to work there because of recently introduced draconian measures.

    But that logo tweak Marissa Mayer shepherded to completion is amazing!

    • their email sucks

      Depends how you use it. Yahoo have one of the best systems for creating throwaway email addresses, I've been using them for years and have accumulated around 70 of them. Their UI gets more cumbersome and slow with each fab new design iteration, but I don't check email online, I use POP down to Thunderbird.

      Except that the POP account is Gmail, as Gmail has the best spam detection, but for some reason an utterly useless alias system (some email forms don't even accept "+" signs). So my Yahoo account, with the

  • The last update to yahoo mail was horrid. I am far from the only person who thought so.

    I stopped using yahoo maps a long time ago when they screwed that up.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Reducing Their Focus? (Score:3)

    by R3d M3rcury ( 871886 ) on Thursday June 04, 2015 @09:01PM (#49844569) Journal

    Yahoo is [...] reducing the availability of Yahoo TV and Yahoo Music. The company has decided instead to focus on three major parts of its business: search, communications, and digital content.

    Okay, TV and Music seem to be "digital content." So they're reducing what they're focusing on?

    And if they're reducing, why are they spending what I assume is a ludicrous amount of money on this [nfl.com]?

  • Just "communications" and "digital content," eh? (Score:3)

    by Art3x ( 973401 ) on Thursday June 04, 2015 @09:37PM (#49844773)

    The company has decided instead to focus on three major parts of its business: search, communications, and digital content.

    I'm sure they had something more specific in mind, but "communications" and "digital content" covers just about everything.

  • I recently discovered the nice work they did on their Android apps (finance & weather). I had completely written Yahoo! off before then. If they keep that up, they might get some traction from them. (It even got me to sign in to my old account)
  • Yahoo has decided that it's major focus must me more Kim Kardashian stories. Apparently only 2/3rds iof their total content isnt enough.
  • I haven't found anything that matches Yahoo! for its financial pages. I've used their Portfolios feature to keep track of a variety of investments for quite some time. Portfolios can be set up with a variety of views that gives me what I want to know about my investments.If you want historical information on particular stocks, mutual funds or indices, you can usually find it there. If others here have a better free recommendation I'd like to hear about it. The yahoo.com home age aggregates information that'

    • I also enjoy tracking stocks on Yahoo portfolios. It was just a slight nick in my chest (as opposed to a stab in the heart) when they replaced the old Gnuplots with the new charts, which have less data. Maybe they were getting screwed by the data provider, and if that's the reason then I can understand that. Anyway, their portfolios and charts remain useful, and I still use them too. It's nice to be able to check stocks you own without logging into a broker, and check stuff you don't own but are thinkin

  • anyone know a pipes alternative? It's very useful in combining feeds for mashups

  • As mentioned at the start of the thread it's sad to see yahoo starting to shutdown. I remember when Yahoo was considered the leader of the pack and the most used search engine.. I was one of it's first users but Google was better from day one and offered less on it's main page so I switched.

    Not the first site I've had an account yet can't access anymore, so a different note bye bye Yahoo, I spent three hours tonight trying to create a new account on yahoo.com (for the PowerPro discussion group) after numer

  • Whenever I get called in to cleanup unwanted malware from the PCs of family and friends it is most commonly search hijacking by Yahoo.

    This increasingly desperate behaviour is ultimately counter productive, the Yahoo brand is trash and some friends actually call the search hijacking they suffer the "Yahoo Virus".

  • They were right after mapquest to jump into the mapping game. Their China coverage is miles and miles better than Google, with both english and mandarin names on the map (google is only mandarin when you are in China). Too bad.

  • Losing it sucks. Not sure how to replace it.

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