Sunnyvale, California — Yahoo Inc which acquired Xoopit, a startup for $20 million in July this year, announced just last week that it will discontinue support for a popular Gmail plug-in with Xoopit, but said it would continue support for open accounts. Xoopit, which combines media files from users’ Gmail accounts, has now been integrated into Yahoo’s own Web mail service.
Yahoo notified via an email to Xoopit users on Gmail tilted, “Xoopit for Gmail is closing. Here is the info you will need.” It details different ways users can export their files, photos, videos, and other attachments which may be stored on the service. From the email:
Users of Xoopit will have until November 13, 2009, to backup any media stored on Yahoo’s servers, after which it will no longer be available. However, the company will continue to retain any data until next February in accordance with its 90-day retention policy. Doing this is necessary only for users who have deleted the source file from their Gmail account, as Xoopit simply copies over the media, leaving the version on Google’s servers intact.
The company said it will be officially switching off Xoopit for Gmail to focus our efforts on making My Photos for Yahoo! Mail an amazing product and bring those features to all Yahoo! Mail users. Given our focus, we decided we cannot adequately support the Xoopit for Gmail product and give you a great experience in the future. Here are some details to guide you through this transition, which only began working with the Xoopit service in December.
Xoopit is a convenient email plug-in that functions well with both Gmail and Yahoo Mail, where it powers the My Photos feature. In Gmail, it creates a strip across the top which shows you images of all recent attachments, making it possible to visually scan email for their contents instead of by subject lines. You can also click on the Xoopit thumbnail strip so that it takes over the whole screen with a grid of photos, images,videos, and docs.
Along with access to Xoopit, Yahoo is also discontinuing its Firefox add-on and Facebook integration for Gmail.
The browser add-on has enabled users to view attachments and other media in their Gmail accounts as a file explorer — functionality that has since been replaced by some of Google’s Gmail Labs add-ons. Users with the browser add-on installed could also connect with Facebook to see and view status updates from within Gmail, a feature that will also become unavailable from now on.