Friday
Sep282007
Another Brick In The Wall
Friday, September 28, 2007 at 8:40AM
Apparently Yahoo Podcasts was among its least used services. -sigh-
MediaPost Publications 09/28/2007 (via Larry Reich)
YAHOO WILL DISCONTINUE ITS UNDERUSED service for finding and rating audio podcasts on Oct. 31, according to the Yahoo blog. The jettison is part of the 100-day review of Yahoo operations by co-founder Jerry Yang.
tagged News, Podcasting in Blog
News, Podcasting in Blog
Reader Comments (13)
Sad, but not entirely unsurprising. Simply not mainstream enough.
[...] Podcasts service to be discontinued, reports Online Media Daily. Via the LOL. [...]
It's a pity they never really did anything with it. Being Yet Another Podcast Directory never had much value.
There is/was a Yahoo podcasts?
-A
It wasn't used because:
1. It was crap
2. Nobody (and here I refer to Normals) knew it existed.
What we need is for Google to add a 'Podcasts' search option.
Saw the headline and assumed this was going to be about someone's unlocked iPhone! Silly me...
I admit...I'm borderline 'normal' and I didn't know it existed...
It's a shame Yahoo! couldn't make the service more valuable/prominent since they have such a far reach with the mainstream internet community.
I too did not know it existed and MyYahoo! is my home page. There are so many desktop programs that farm them, it wouldn't even occur to me to look in Yahoo! for it.
Maybe if they had kept the most recent episodes up to date people would have downloaded episodes. My podcast "Off the Beat-n-Track Radio Show" is up to show# 260 and they have 251 as the most recent.
I think companies have a limited amount of time to imprint themselves on the public. Yahoo's big chance came, and its miserable, unreadable home page because such a hyperactive nightmare that nobody knew what they were up to. Then Google came with a plain home page and a better search engine. Tilt, game over. Yahoo's tried to fight back with a million and one me-too services, but the game is over. Will they get another kick at the can? Maybe, maybe not.
Yahoo seems to be closing a lot down nowadays. They just shuttered Yahoo Photos (after buying Flickr), and recent rumors have it that Yahoo 360 will be next to close its doors (the help desk email bounces back from them and nobody from the development team has been seen in over a month).
Yahoo seems to be caught up in the "what's new" syndrome. They don't get half their products out of beta before they run off and start another product leaving all the bugs behind (and frustrated users) of the first.
This doesn't surprise me.
Most of the time, submitting podcasts to it didn't work - and when I've worked on projects where Yahoo was a sponsor and tried to go through their chain, they STILL didn't post the podcasts with a manual override - on content that was sponsored by them and had their staff on it!
It seems as if it was poorly-thought out and never executed right from the beginning... or, internal politics doomed it from the beginning (a phenomenon that is common in the corporate world).