KICKSTART : Yahoo !’s (hopefully) last shutdown in 2008
Yahoo! has shut down yet another web service under its name called KICKSTART which launched back in April but didn’t really pick up traction anytime during the past 8 months.
Call it the current ill fate of Yahoo! or Kickstart’s poor ideation(it was nothing more than a re-iteration of the pretty old concept of bridging students & alumnis and letting business relations develop inbetween),there were never big hopes by anybody(even Y! itself,i suppose) from Kickstart and the service hardly excited any lad to give it a serious try.
As Yahoo! has shut down many of its subsidiary services this year,(such as Y!Music,Mash,Y!Live,Jumpcut),it seems that Yahoo! has not been able to capitalise its initiatives(even with its brand value) all this year.
And seeing all the ups and downs(from Jerry stepping down as Yahoo’s CEO to Massive Layoff),the general perception towards Yahoo! brand has turned really bad.Rather,Yahoo’s association is now acting in an opposite sense that any startup that gets acquired by Yahoo! is more probable to loose out some of its traction.
There will surely be many such announcements in the year 2009 by Yahoo!,shutting down more and more of its beta stage services.Our judgement says that Yahoo! will soon announce closure of its closed beta website,which it announced in September called SpotM,a social network for indian youth.
SpotM,although still in closed beta is another such service by Yahoo!,which lacks innovation(couple of new features such as ‘private friend’ doesn’t make it alluring enough) and is jumping into a saturated market(Orkut clearly wins in India).
What Yahoo! needs is some lime-fresh ideas and its rock-hard implementation.Yahoo ! Glue(All in one,three column search layout) isn’t a bad idea actually.They got to take it out of beta now(‘Glue’ is under beta testing within Y! India right now).
*Something ‘Never Before’ is scheduled to happen here at TechPluto on Jan 1,2009 ….Don’t miss it !*
