Yahoo Inc. is on the verge of closing down its maps services, among other things. This is due to happen by the end of the month.
Representatives of the company stated they have made this decision because they want to put their energy and resources into search business, content and communication tools.
The announcement was made through a blog post. However, representatives of Yahoo did not want to make further comments on this piece of news. The information was posted on Friday, the 5th of June.
The map was mainly useful for drivers, as it gave them directions and provided information on traffic conditions. It was considered to be a very important part of Yahoo, ever since it first appeared eight years ago.
“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,” wrote Amotz Maimon, who is the company’s chief architect, in the blog where he was bidding farewell to the service.
According to their blog, along with its maps services, the giant company will also shut down many other sites all over the world. This includes Yahoo Movies in Spain, Yahoo TV in Britain, Yahoo Music in both Canada and France, Yahoo Autos in the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Spain, Italy and Yahoo’s Philippines page. The latter will redirect users to Yahoo Singapore.
They have also announced that they will stop providing Yahoo Mail services on older versions of iPad and iPhone operating systems. In addition to that, no support for Yahoo Contacts will be available on older variants of Apple’s Mac OS X
Even if Yahoo is closing down its maps services, according to CNET, it won’t vanish completely, because other services will still support it.
A reason for the decision might be that Yahoo Maps had started to become less popular due to the massive use of Google Maps, which seem to be the first choice for many users. Now, with Apple putting a lot of effort into making its own maps service more popular, it seems like a sensible decision for Yahoo to take a step back.
Some of the changes hardly come as a surprise, given the fact that within the last three years, the California-based company has dropped more than 60 products.
Image Source: programmableweb
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