Yahoo is purging underperforming services from its line-up

Yahoo went on a tear last spring, closing down more than a dozen underperforming services as part of a broader streamlining effort to focus on core products. Over the past year, the Internet pioneer has continued to evaluate some of their less popular products and is once again performing a cleanup job that’ll see several more services bite the bullet. Some of the changes have already taken place. For example, Yahoo shut down the Newlook service, an online virtual makeover tool for maktoob.yahoo.com, and the ability to generate research reports on Yahoo Finance on April 30.

Yahoo’s spring cleanings have extended into the summer months, the company announced today, detailing a series of product changes and closures, many of which are nearly obsolete, obscure, or just unpopular. But among the more high-profile of these closures isYahoo acquisition Xobni, the maker of smart email and contacts management apps that were acquired last summer. At the time of the acquisition announcement, Yahoo said people using Xobni’s products would be able to continue to do so “indefinitely.” However, in today’s post, the company points to a FAQ on the Xobni website, implying that the product’s total shutdown was previously announced. That may confuse the handful of remaining Xobni users who may have thought that as long as they had the Xobni Smartr app installed, for instance, it would continue to work even though it was no longer being actively developed or supported. But according to this new post, today is Xobni’s last day. Says Jay Rossiter, Yahoo SVP, Cloud Platform Group, Yahoo has instead “incorporated many Xobni-like features into Yahoo Mail” including compose auto-suggest and people-centric mail search.