Yahoo! to dump web 2.0 goldrush sites

Some well-known Yahoo! web properties, some of which were purchased during the web 2.0 era goldrush, have appeared on an internal “sunset” list leaked onto the web this week.

They include social network for the blogger community MyBlogLog, Yahoo! Picks, social bookmarking service Delicious (formerly del.icio.us), Yahoo! Bookmarks, Yahoo! Buzz and search service AltaVista.

“We’re actively thinking about the future of Delicious and we believe there is a home outside the company that would make more sense for the service, our users and our shareholders,” Yahoo! said.

A message at the Delicious blog assured users that the social Website bookmarking service was not being shut down.

While not a “strategic fit” for Yahoo!, Delicious could find an “ideal home” elsewhere.

The site was founded by Joshua Schachter in 2003 and acquired by Yahoo! in 2005 for an estimated amount of between $15-$30-million. By the end of 2008, the service claimed more than 5.3-million users and 180-million unique bookmarked URLs.

The site’s original “del.icio.us” domain name was a well-known example of a domain hack, an unconventional combination of letters to form a word or phrase. Del.icio.us and delicio.us now redirect to its new domain, delicious.com.

The other early web 2.0 innovator in the firing line is blog community social network MyBlogLog. MyBlogLog was acquired by Yahoo in 2007 for about $10-million. The site at one stage claimed to average around 22-million visits to pages via its widgets each day. Currently the site claims to have about 645 000 registered members.

The new wave of Yahoo! workforce and product cuts come as the struggling Internet pioneer is trying to re-invent itself.

“Part of our organisational streamlining involves shifting our investment with off-strategy products to put better focus on our core strengths and fund new innovation in the next year and beyond,” Yahoo! said.

The Sunnyvale, California-based firm declined to discuss other properties on the list other than to say that it was making decisions based on which products had promise and which were under-performing.

Yahoo! on Tuesday announced that it would cut about 600 jobs, about four percent of its global workforce, as it fought to regain its footing on a shifting Internet landscape increasingly dominated by Google and Facebook.

It was the third round of layoffs since the fall of 2008 and the second since Carol Bartz took over as chief executive in January 2009.

Bartz replaced Yahoo! co-founder Jerry Yang at the helm after the company rebuffed a bid by Microsoft to buy the company for about 45 billion dollars in early 2008.

Microsoft and Yahoo! reached an agreement last year that calls for the US software giant to power searches at all Yahoo! websites.

Yahoo! will continue, however, to present search results in its own fashion on its sites, with only a discreet reference at the bottom of the page to their being “Powered by Bing,” Microsoft’s new search engine.

Yahoo! has “disposed of non-core assets” while making strategic acquisitions and cultivating partnerships with hot young Internet stars Facebook, Twitter, and Zynga, according to Bartz.