Yet another day and Yahoo decides to close down yet another of its properties. After Yahoo 360, another social network, SpotM – the India specific website that was never out of private beta has now closed.
So, what was exactly happening on the website? Yahoo claims it was just an experiment of their communications product. It was targeted at the 16-24 crowd and offered a few features that are not otherwise available on Orkut and Facebook – the ability to set friends as private, SMS integration which allowed users to communicate via SMS without actually having to know the recipient’s mobile number.
SpotM was never promoted, was never out of private beta and yet closed down on the eve of its completion of one year. The timing of the closure does make it look like an organized experiment, the learnings of which Yahoo could be carrying forward in its other new social offerings, like the upcoming Yahoo Meme. But what looks more likely is the consolidation that has been at play ever since Carol Bartz took over the reins at Yahoo Inc.
Ever since Ms. Bartz took over, we have seen the announcements about the closure of Geocities, Yahoo Gallery, Yahoo 360 – their first shot at social networking, Bix – a Karaoke service, Yahoo Live, Jumpcut, Maven – all online video distribution properties to name a few besides the sale of premium domain names like Contests.com.
I will not miss SpotM like I do with Geocities, but I do think this is a step forward in the right direction. Yahoo’s properties are everywhere and it needs time to consolidate them all, close down those sites that do not fit its strategy – things that will make it a worthy runners-up, which Yahoo has anyway been all of this decade.
Is there any reason why they were targetting the beta to Indian audience?
yahoo closes spotM and voila: GURU is coming