The Members Forum

It has been fairly amazing to watch this Yahoo “sunsetting” news over the past 48 hours. It seemed to go from a bad leak, to huge backlash, to PR disaster, to confusion, to worse PR disaster. Now Yahoo, by way of Delicious (the most prominent service being “sunset”), has responded by lashing out at all the press for the coverage of the fiasco. Danny Sullivan just did a great job of ripping them a new one for this nonsense misdirection. But the issue actually goes much deeper.

Yahoo may not be killing Delicious, but they have killed something else: consumer confidence in them.

The entire time I was reading the back and forth of this fiasco, I had one thought on my mind: I need to get my pictures out of Flickr, pronto. No, Flickr wasn’t on the list of companies being “sunset”, but how do I know that in a year it won’t be? Hell, maybe even 6 months from now? I don’t. In fact, I’d say it’s 50/50 that something similar happens with that service.

Sure, Delicious has been largely stagnant over the past few years (which, of course, is Yahoo’s fault), but it has long been one of the mainstays of the so-called “Web 2.0″ movement. In fact, the sale of Delicious to Yahoo was one of the first stories that TechCrunch broke back in 2005. There are a ton of people that have a ton of data in it. It’s still a valuable tool to those people. It has millions of users. Yahoo just gave them all the middle finger.

Mathew Ingram argues that the moves makes sense from a business perspective. Maybe. But the key ingredient of Yahoo’s business is people using their services. If they’ve showing that they can just kill off such a big one on a whim, I’m just not sure how they can convince us that all of them aren’t at risk.

Yahoo says that Delicious isn’t “a strategic fit” for the company anymore. How is Flickr? I know the CEO Carol Bartz has a hard time explaining what Yahoo is, but of the dozen answers she has given, one hasn’t been “photo-sharing service”.

TechCrunch has the details HERE!