Just 6 months after opening shop, Yahoo! has
decided to shut down its news aggregator, Flipboard for iPad competitor,
Livestand. The news app provided content from Yahoo! and many of its
verticals, like Forbes and the NFL. It was aimed to be a competitor to
Flipboard and Zite on the iPad, and it even customized your story
preferences based on your Facebook activity and your reading habits. The
app didn't receive a huge amount of success, though. It had an average
rating of 4 stars on the iOS App Store with reviews coming in from about
1900 users. Compare that to the 4.5 star average rating that Flipboard
has from about 154,682 reviews. Zite has a 4.5 star average rating from
about 5606 user reviews.
The reason Yahoo! shut down Livestand, as they've mentioned in a blog post, is consolidation. The blog post says, "As
announced during our most recent earnings call, we’ve decided to
discontinue or consolidate a number of products across Yahoo!'s
technology platforms over the course of 2012. Platform consolidation
enables us to put many Yahoo! properties onto common key platforms and
technologies to make everything more scalable and nimble. And when we
discontinue products, it will be so that we can focus on opportunities
where we lead and where we can create the most meaningful experiences
for people using our products, and for our partners, developers and
advertisers. One of the first decisions we've made along these lines is
to discontinue our personalized digital newsstand app, Livestand for
iPad."
Yahoo! is now focusing their efforts on mobile first projects, like their recently launched browser, Axis.
Yahoo! says that their biggest focus right now is going to be the smart
device user, whether he or she uses an iPhone or an iPad, iOS or
Android, or mobile webs and browsers for that matter. Yahoo! says that
Livestand taught them how to make HTML5 media properties for these smart
devices.
Yahoo! recently had scandal issues on their home turf when their CEO, Scott Thompson presented
his university degree falsely and then blamed the error on a head
hunter. Yahoo! then issued a statement saying that Thompson had left the
company for "personal reasons". In this consolidation effort, Yahoo!
says they will either discontinue or consolidate their product, which
stems from an initiative that Thompson had started to re-allocate
resources to key products. The CEO that's currently in interim, Ross
Levinsohn is obviously pushing this initiative forward. Part of this is
pushing Yahoo! content through the Axis app. These search results also
heavily favour Yahoo! content, like Yahoo! Finance and Yahoo! Sports.