Yahoo may not have wanted to hear the awful truth in the Peanut Butter Manifesto that circulated a few months ago, but someone there must have listened.
On the heels of the announcement of Yahoo CEO Terry Semel’s 2006 bonus – 800,000 shares of stock worth $25.7 million in a year where shares of Yahoo dropped by some 35 percent – a smaller piece of news emerged. Yahoo has shuttered its youth mobile product, Mixd:
Mixd is going away, for now. The Mixd pilot study ended on February 25th, and the service will no longer be available. We’ve learned a lot from here, and you can expect to see more great mobile products from Yahoo! in the future. Thanks for your participation in Mixd. For more mobile, check out Yahoo! Mobile.
So long and thanks for all the user data, perhaps? Richard MacManus received some feedback from Yahoo about the end of Mixd:
Yahoo told Read/WriteWeb that from Mixd they “gained valuable insight about how youth communities socialize via mobile phones.” Yahoo says they will incorporate group text messaging and multimedia sharing features into future Yahoo! mobile products.
The concept of group messaging seems to have some legs. Twitter has found a userbase, to the extent that its founder, Evan Williams, put his Odeo site up for sale to focus on Twitter instead. Yahoo has a much larger userbase, numbering in the millions. That advantage could be negated by Twitter’s simpler model when compared to Yahoo Mobile. Which in turn could make it an acquisition target in the way that the Delicious model found an audience and became purchase-bait. Delicious could be in the middle of another consolidation discussion, when compared to Yahoo My Web. Flickr versus Yahoo Photos has already been the subject of such speculation. Yahoo has a few duplicate services. If they’re going to keep the CEO, maybe it makes sense to do some trimming among the product lines. —
