Sunnyvale, California — Yahoo Go, a four-year-old mobile application service that connects users to a number of diversified services (including mail, news, and weather), is reportedly getting ready to pull its shutter down on January 12, 2010, the company announced. Yahoo has decided to focus its mobile efforts elsewhere.
Starting the beginning of 2010, Yahoo Go, the mobile application service, introduced in 2006 at the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, will be discontinued, though it seems that the company plans on concentrating on the development of applications and services for high-end smartphones, including those based on the Android operating system or the iPhone.
Yahoo Go was a downloadable application that delivered access to Yahoo’s search, including e-mail, contacts, calendar, and photos — across multiple devices, including mobile phones, TVs, and PCs., as well as to third-party services. The application was functioning on more than 400 handsets, and also came to the market through carriers around the world. In 2007 Yahoo and mobile phone maker HTC teamed up to offer version 2.0 of Yahoo Go on Windows Mobile handsets, and Yahoo later released a third version.
Yahoo Go will be pulled down and all users should receive an email today informing them that the service will be discontinued starting with January 12.
In an email sent to Yahoo Go users, the company announced, “Yahoo! Go will be discontinued on January 12, 2010, at 12:00 a.m. PST, so that we may focus on simplifying and enhancing your future mobile Web experiences. After this date, you will no longer be able to use Yahoo! Go 2.0 or 3.0 from your mobile phone.”
The email then plugged Yahoo Go’s effective replacement, m.yahoo.com, continuing, “We encourage you to visit the new mobile homepage from your mobile browser to access an even richer, more personalized Yahoo! Experience.”
“These monolithic all-in-one app experiences were a great strategy for the time, and it gained millions of users, but we have evolved with the market. Everything we have done so far in 2009 is a fulfillment of that strategy,” Adam Taggart, Yahoo Mobile’s head of Global Marketing, said in a statement to mocoNews. In addition, Yahoo’s strategy for the mobile market is said to include investments in the mobile browser and in building applications for smartphones.
Yahoo’s mobile group is now concentrating on delivering apps for Flickr, Fantasy Football, and Finance, as well as on offering a Yahoo Go-like experience to those accessing its homepage through a mobile browser or through an iPhone app. The Android will be one of the main areas Yahoo will work on, as the platform is gaining momentum.
Shuttering Yahoo Go was a smart move, as the service had outlived its usefulness. Yahoo Go joins a long list of Yahoo products and services that have recently been closed for the sake of conserving resources, including Briefcase, FareChase, and Geocities.
The Yahoo for Mobile browser has been a major project as well. Despite these efforts, Yahoo seems aimless right now. Hopefully it can figure out what it wants to be.