Some of you may have used Yahoo! Mim, a local version of Yahoo! Meme that was created in November 2009 as a blog platform or photoblog. Even though I’ve known about this service from Yahoo, I just found out that it had an app for the iPad. Unfortunately, Yahoo! Mim for iPad is one among ten Yahoo! mobile apps that will no longer be supported. The service itself however, will still be available through the website.
Aside from Yahoo!Mim for iPad, Yahoo! is also ending support for nine other mobile apps. These are Yahoo! Meme (iPad and iPhone), Yahoo! Answers (Android), Yahoo! AppSpot (Android and iPhone), Yahoo! Deals (iPhone), Yahoo! Finance (BlackBerry), Yahoo! Movies (Android), Yahoo! News (Android), Yahoo! Shopping (iPhone), and Yahoo! Sketch-a-Search (iPad and iPhone). Fortunately for Koprol, its mobile apps survive the cut.
This decision is part of the restructuring led by new CEO Scott Thompson. Despite this decision, Yahoo! remains committed to the mobile environment especially on iOS and Android. Just recently Yahoo! updated its iPhone search application with new features. With this restructuring, the engineers will focus on major applications – which should improve the application’s result quality.
The step that is taken at the beginning of this year can be understood. This isn’t as drastic as the number of steps taken last year: Yahoo! has closed a number of services and sells Delicious to avos (owned by the founders of YouTube).
It doesn’t appear that Yahoo!Mim has a significant number of enthusiastic user base despite having features similar to Tumblr which is far much more popular. Yahoo! Indonesia’s own Mim account in fact hasn’t been publishing anything since June 2010.
Yahoo! hadn’t had any success in delivering a sustainable blog platform. Both Yahoo!Pulse and Yahoo!360º failed to achieve any significant traction in their markets. It seems to me that aside from turning off the application, it’s time to evaluate whether Yahoo!Meme and Yahoo!Mim are worth to maintain.
