Yahoo does Spring Cleaning: Shuts down Maps, Pipes & more

In case you were wondering what it is exactly that Yahoo does these days, the company says its focus is on "search, communications and digital content." The rest must go, and as such, Yahoo today has announced some things it is getting rid of.

For starters, the company is doing away with maps.yahoo.com (a.k.a. Yahoo Maps) at the end of June. Though maps will live on within Yahoo search and Flickr in some fashion.  "We made this decision to better align resources to Yahoo's priorities as our business has evolved since we first launched Yahoo Maps eight years ago."

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Also on the way out, according to the company's "Q2 2015 Progress Report on Our Product Prioritization":

*Support for Yahoo Mail on the built-in Mail app on Apple devices running iOS older than Version 5 as of June 15. "If you use iOS 4 & earlier, you can continue to use Yahoo Mail on their Safari mobile browser at mail.yahoo.com," according to Yahoo Chief Architect Amotz Maimon.

*GeoPlanet & PlaceSpotter APIs are being retired in Q3, which means developers will need to look for the capabilities from those APIs in Yahoo Query Language and BOSS.

*Yahoo Pipes, a tool for building visually-enticing Web apps from feeds, pages and other services, will no longer by supported as of Aug. 30. 

*Assorted Yahoo media properties, including Yahoo Music in France and Canada, will be axed as the company streamlines its market-specific media properties.

About a year ago, Yahoo also nixed a handful of offerings, including the Xobni email app it has acquired, along with the Yahoo toolbar on Chrome and the Yahoo People Search directory.

Yahoo has earned something of a reputation as well for acquiring apps (i.e., Blink and Kismet) and then killing them shortly afterwards.

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