Yahoo announces plans to kill off Maps, Pipes, GeoPlanet and PlaceSpotter APIs, and some regional sites

Yahoo today released an updated product report for 2015, highlighting the closure of several products, regional sites, and support for older Apple devices in some cases.

First off, the company is shutting down its Yahoo Maps site at the end of June. Maps aren’t completely going away though, as the company notes it needs to keep them around in “the context of Yahoo search and on several other Yahoo properties including Flickr.”

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This is a big decision for a service that has been around for eight years, which is more like 80 years in Internet time. Yahoo is essentially admitting too few people consciously navigate to Yahoo Maps rather than Google Maps or Bing Maps.

Yahoo Pipes, a web application that lets developers build data mashups that aggregate webpages and services, will go into read-only mode (no Pipes creation) on August 30. Pipes infrastructure will be shut down on September 30, giving developers some time to migrate their projects and data.

If you’ve never heard of it, think of Yahoo Pipes as the predecessor to IFTTT. Both let you filter, manipulate, and repurpose web data with no programming knowledge required.

Speaking of developers, Yahoo is killing off two APIs in Q3: GeoPlanet and PlaceSpotter. Yahoo said this is part of standardizing and consolidating its offerings, as the functionality is already in Yahoo Query Language (YQL) for non-commercial usage and BOSS Geo Services for commercial usage.

Yahoo is also closing some of its market-specific media properties in the coming weeks:

• Yahoo Music in France and Canada, Yahoo Movies in Spain, the Yahoo Philippines homepage, and genre-specific media sites will close in mid-June.
• Yahoo TV in the U.K., France, Germany, Spain, Italy, and Canada, as well as Yahoo Autos in the U.K., France, Germany, Spain, and Italy will close at the end of June.
• Yahoo Entertainment in Singapore will close in early July.

Yahoo said the content from these sites will be redistributed across the Yahoo network. The company was once very bullish on personalized content, but recently it has been pulling back from that effort, at least in terms of regional sites. Yahoo also closed various regional news sites late last year in its efforts to streamline its editorial offerings.

Yahoo is also killing support for Yahoo Mail on the built-in Mail app for devices prior to iOS 5 and support for syncing Yahoo Contacts for Macs prior to OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion on June 15. Mail and Contacts can still be accessed on these older Apple devices via Safari; both moves are being done in order to maintain focus on security, speed, and functionality of both services, Yahoo said.

At the end of 2014, Yahoo said it has closed more than 60 products and services in the past two years in order to help narrow its focus as a company. It didn’t provide an update for the figure today, but the number continues to climb under CEO Marissa Mayer.

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