Yahoo to cut features after latest round of layoffs

SAN FRANCISCO - Yahoo is to cut some prominent website features following the announcement this week that it is firing some 600 workers, or 4 percent of its work force.

While many of the targeted features have been little used, some, like the Delicious bookmark sharing service have proved popular among Yahoo users who fired off messages of disappointment Friday.

“RIP Delicious: You Were So Beautiful to Me,” lamented blogger Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb.com, who eulogized the service that Yahoo bought in 2005 as one of the best ways to archive and datamine the internet. “So much value. So unappreciated. So tragically lost.”

Other Delicious enthusiasts launched a Twitter campaign to save the service, but there was little such activism for the other features to be canned by the struggling internet pioneer, such as the news sharing service Yahoo Buzz, MyBlogLog and Alta Vista, which had been a top search engine before the advent of Google.

Yahoo confirmed the closings in an email statement to The Wall Street Journal’s All Things Digital.

“Part of our organisational streamlining involves cutting our investment in underperforming or off-strategy products to put better focus on our core strengths and fund new innovation in the next year and beyond,” said the company in a statement.

“We continuously evaluate and prioritise our portfolio of products and services, and do plan to shut down some products in the coming months such as Yahoo! Buzz, our Traffic APIs, and others. We will communicate specific plans when appropriate.”