Yahoo to Shut Down Maps, Pipes, and Some Other Services

Yahoo Inc said it was shutting down a few of its services, including Yahoo Maps and Yahoo Pipes, as it realigns itself to focus on search and digital content.

Maps.yahoo.com will shut down by the end of this month, Amotz Maimon, Yahoo's chief architect, said in a blog post, as the service faces intense competition from Google Inc's Maps service.

Yahoo's search and other services including photo-sharing website Flickr will still support Yahoo Maps, Maimon said.

These steps follow efforts by Chief Executive Marissa Mayer to revive meaningful revenue growth with a string of acquisitions and product revamps.

Mayer has been under pressure to make quicker progress in strengthening the company's media and advertising business.

Yahoo is scaling back mail support on the built-in Mail app for older versions of Apple Inc's iPhone operating system, Maimon said on Thursday.

Yahoo said the Philippines homepage would be shuttered. It will also close Yahoo Music services in France and Canada and Yahoo Movies in Spain.

Media services such as Yahoo TV and Yahoo Autos will be stopped in the UK, France, Germany, Spain and Italy at the end of June. Yahoo Pipes will not allow creation of new pipes after August 30 and will run in a read-only mode until September 30 when it will be completely shut down.

Last month, Yahoo revamped its Flickr service, pushing out a major update to its Flickr apps on mobile and desktop platforms, as well as the Web service, completely overhauling the UI. The updated apps for Android, iOS, Mac, and Windows are now available. The design changes help users better organise their photos along with easy locating and sharing of images and videos.

The company says the major UI design revamp of Flickr will let users take advantage of the 1TB of free storage available to them. That amount of storage could pose a challenge for certain users when it comes to sorting out the larger number of images and videos they upload to the service.

Written with inputs from Reuters