At least Yahoo is consistent. At a time when many tech companies are starting to launch new projects again, and excitement is building, Yahoo keeps shutting things down.
The latest is their Shopping API, which they announced on their developer network blog today would be killed on March 11, 2010. Why? Well, Yahoo decided to enter into an agreement with PriceGrabber to power the same thing for the Yahoo Shopping area. The worst part is that not only is Yahoo shutting their own service down, but developer’s currently using the Yahoo Shopping API can’t even transition to Yahoo’s new method smoothly. As Yahoo notes, any developer that wishes to continue to display results from Yahoo Shopping will have to apply to PriceGrabber to get permission. Lame.
Yahoo has gotten in the habit of outsourcing things recently. You may recall, last month, they gave up on trying to figure out social networking, and handed it over to Facebook. And of course, we all know what has happened with the core search product, which will soon just be a layer on top of Microsoft Bing. Though they’ve stated their not sure what to do with other products such as MyBlogLog, indications are that those could be on the chopping block soon as well. Etc, etc.
Hey, at least they have the new cycling team to look forward to!
[photo: flickr/gregorygameswalsh]