Yahoo

From IndieWeb


Yahoo is a portal website that has a number of services, silos, and tools.

Silos

Acquisitions:

Issues

Concerns about closing down services

Yahoo! announced on 2015-12-10 that they will spin all the core services to a separate company and keep solely shareholdings of Alibaba and Yahoo Japan in the main company profile.

This could soon lead to closing down services that are not generating profit, however, the concerns are yet to be addressed.

Privacy

Yahoo Inc last year secretly built a custom software program to search all of its customers' incoming emails for specific information provided by U.S. intelligence officials, according to people familiar with the matter.

The company complied with a classified U.S. government demand, scanning hundreds of millions of Yahoo Mail accounts at the behest of the National Security Agency or FBI, said three former employees and a fourth person apprised of the events.

...

They were also upset that Mayer and Yahoo General Counsel Ron Bell did not involve the company's security team in the process, instead asking Yahoo's email engineers to write a program to siphon off messages containing the character string the spies sought and store them for remote retrieval, according to the sources.

Exclusive: Yahoo secretly scanned customer emails for U.S. intelligence - sources

Hosted Services

Yahoo provides hosted client services:

Notification Services:

Embeddable Services

  • Yahoo! WebPlayer - https://info.yahoo.com/privacy/us/yahoo/webplayer/
    • 2013-06-30 was scheduled for shutdown.[1]
      • If you’re a publisher and currently using Yahoo! WebPlayer on your site, after June 30 the Yahoo! WebPlayer won’t load. Your users will continue to be able to play media files using native browser support. You may wish to locate and remove the following line in your code: script type="text/javascript" src="http://webplayer.yahooapis.com/player.js"
    • 2013-07-03 was restored[2]

Dead Silos

Yahoo has shutdown a number of silos:

  • 2008[3] Yahoo 360
  • 2009-10-26[4] Geocities (was an acquisition)
  • 2013-04-30 Upcoming
  • ...

See site-deaths for more.

Dead Services

For full list see: Closed/defunct services list in Wikipedia

  • 2013-07-01 Yahoo! RSS Alerts[5][6]
    • "To continue to get the latest content that you care about, you can subscribe to Keyword News alerts at our Yahoo! Alerts and receive them via email."
  • 2013-07-08 AltaVista[7][8]
    • Acquisition.
  • 2013-07-25 Yahoo! Stars India[9][10]
    • "To stay up on all your favorite celebrity news, check out Yahoo! India OMG!."
    • Was a site that enabled you to follow stars in India. No known user contributed content.
  • 2013-07-31 Yahoo! Downloads Beta[11][12]
    • "Yahoo! Downloads will no longer support 3rd party downloads. It will continue to offer downloads of Yahoo! products like Yahoo! Toolbar or Yahoo! Messenger."
    • Was a service to facilitate 3rd party downloads. No known user contributed content (presumably all downloads were mirrored from 3rd party sites).
  • 2013-09-28 Yahoo Local API and Yahoo Term Extraction API[13][14]

Dead Tools

Yahoo has shut down support for a number of tools:

  • 2013-06-28 Yahoo! Axis[15]
  • 2013-06-28 Yahoo! Browser Plus[16]
  • 2013-06-28 Citizen Sports iOS and Android apps. [17][18]
    • Apparently just apps: "You can still get all the latest sports news on Yahoo! Sports, play fantasy sports like Fantasy Football, and stay up-to-date when you’re on the go with our new Yahoo! Sports app for iOS and Android."
    • Unclear how much "fantasy sports" user data was lost or it was ever on a website.
    • 2010-03-17 Yahoo acquired Citizen Sports.[19]
  • 2013-07-01 FoxyTunes browser extension[20][21]
    • 2013-06-28 Shutdown announced.
    • 2008-02-04 Acquired by Yahoo.[22]
  • ...

See Also