Yahoo Closing Shine, Xobni, Revamps Other Products

CEO Marissa Mayer’s two-year tenure at Yahoo has been defined by a ceaseless series of startup acquisitions and the overhaul of core properties on the site. Those efforts have left some collateral damage the company is now cleaning up.

To that end, Yahoo is shutting down or repurposing a range of products -- from women’s lifestyle site Shine to email management service Xobni.

Shine, which in April was rumored to be phased out, will close on July 31. The site, which launched in 2008, is a casualty of Yahoo’s recent rollout of glossy digital magazines covering topics like beauty, food and travel.

Xobni, which Yahoo acquired last year, was shut down as a standalone service on Wednesday. “We have incorporated many Xobni-like features into Yahoo Mail (like compose auto-suggest and people-centric mail search) and the technology behind the product continues to inform our current and future user experiences,” stated Jay Rossiter, senior vice president of Yahoo’s cloud platform group, in a blog post.

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Yahoo Voices and the Yahoo Contributor Network, will be shuttered, respectively, at the end of July and end of August, with all published content getting pulled from the Web. Yahoo added the contributor network in 2010 following its acquisition of Associated Content, allowing freelancers to post articles and other media to the Web portal.

Yahoo also said it’s closing Yahoo People Search, a defunct directory site, in favor of the main Yahoo Search service. By July 22, the Yahoo Toolbar will be removed from Chrome Web store. The company instead is offering an extension for the Google browser.

Among other products that have already been scrapped are the Newlook service, for virtual makeovers, Yahoo Finances’s research reports, and Bookmarks.yahoo.com.

“By focusing our energy on Yahoo’s four core areas — Search, Communications, Digital Magazines and Video — and the two incredible engines that power them, Flickr and Tumblr, we can make a bigger impact on the things people do everyday,” wrote Rossiter.

At its Newfront event in April, Yahoo previewed new long-form video series, as well as debuting Yahoo Beauty and Yahoo Travel. The company will report second-quarter earnings on July 15. 

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