Yahoo kills off a bunch of features you didn’t know existed

As of April 30th, several of Yahoo’s products will be shuttered as part of their initiative to consolidate focus and resources around their core services. That’s the bad news. The good news is that you’re probably not using any of them. You probably didn’t even know some of them existed. Here’s the list that they announced today:

• Upcoming
• Yahoo! Deals
• Yahoo! SMS Alerts
• Yahoo! Kids (formerly known as Yahooligans)
• Yahoo! Mail and Messenger Feature Phone Apps

It’s not exactly as earth shattering as Google’s announcement that they were killing off their feed reader. Included in the announcement was news that the classic version of Yahoo! Mail would no longer work after June 3rd. All of this comes with good news, though, as they are bringing in Yahoo! Mail for iPad and Android as well as Yahoo! Weather for iPhone. All of this highlights the major problem they’ve had over the last few years. They had no direction. Much like Google, they tried to dabble in this and dabble in that, throwing stuff against the wall to see what stuck. Unlike Google, they didn’t have as many things stick. More importantly, they didn’t have a $40 billion advertising revenue base that allowed them to make mistakes. These are all fine changes and a good sign that CEO Marissa Mayer (despite making the mistake of bringing everyone in house) is really making her mark at the tech company. If there was one thing they should strongly consider changing, it’s to drop the exclamation point from their name. It worked in the 90s. It doesn’t resonate as well today and actually confuses much of what the brand now represents (not to mention that it causes challenges in capitalization and punctuation, but that’s a blogger’s problem).