Yahoo to shut down LiveText, Games and More services
Yahoo announces that it is planning to shut down some of its products including LiveText, Yahoo Games, Yahoo Astrology, and more. The company has taken this decision in order to streamline its business. the company wants to focus on just seven core consumer products: Mail, Tumblr, Search, News, Finance, Lifestyle and Sports.
In a Tumblr post of Yahoo said that
During our last earnings call, we outlined a plan for simplifying the business and focusing on our strengths across seven core consumer products: Mail, Search, Tumblr, News, Sports, Finance and Lifestyle. After a careful evaluation, we’ve decided to make the following product decisions.
The Yahoo gaming site and publishing channels will not be in function after 13 May 2016. Yahoo LiveText is a real-time video texting app, that was introduced last year. Yahoo LiveText would allow users to send videos without sound and according to the company, it was a faster method of video communication that relied on body language, rather than sound. The LiveText will be shutting down during last week of this month.
LiveText allowed us to experiment with new user experiences and features to drive innovations across our products. We plan to incorporate the learnings and features into Yahoo products including Yahoo Messenger, our core messaging platform,Yahoo added.
The company advised players for those who have made in-game purchases via the channel to contact game developers to figure out what options they have for transferring the same. Yahoo said it had reached out to game publishers and asked them to develop a transition plan for players.
Yahoo Maktoob genre-specific media sites, will not provide News, Celebrity, Movies, Style, Helwa, Sports and Weather information and the pages will redirect to the Yahoo Maktoob homepages in Arabic and English.
Yahoo is also shutting down its regional sites in upcoming weeks to streamline editorial offering and will now focus four core content areas: News, Sports, Finance and Lifestyle.
“We are discontinuing BOSS JSON Search API and BOSS Hosted Search, as well as the BOSS Placefinder and Placespotter APIs, on March 31, 2016,” Yahoo stated in the post.