Tech giant Yahoo on Friday announced three of its old school products – Yahoo Education, Qwiki, and Yahoo Directory – are soon going to die.
Yahoo Directory, one of the company’s oldest services, was designed as a directory listing to help users find the types of websites they’re looking for. The Directory was launched in January 1994 by Stanford University graduate students Jerry Yang and David Filo as “Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web.”
It was in 1994 March that it was renamed “Yahoo!,” which stands for “Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle.”
Directory will die its last on December 31 while Directory advertisers will be upgraded to a new service, Yahoo said.
Yahoo Education, a site designed to connect users with education providers and content, is also on the chopping block. Yahoo Reference, which offers content from a wide variety of sources and Homework Help, which offers CliffsNotes literature notes with step-by-step math problem explanations, are some of the important features of the Eductaion service which is set to shut down on Sept. 30.
The iOS app Qwiki, which automatically creates short movies based on photos and video clips from a user’s camera roll, acquired by Yahoo last July will also shut down with effect from November 1. The tech giant however confirmed the Qwiki team will continue to work on media projects within the company.
News of the closures was revealed in a Tumblr post by Jay Rossiter, SVP of Yahoo’s cloud platform group. Explaining the reason for the closures, Rossiter said the closures come as part of the company’s broader strategy to focus on its more successful projects.
Yahoo has already shut down more than 60 products and services over the last two years in a bid to offer fewer things better.
