After twelve years of existence, Yahoo finally shut down Yahoo Picks, a service which highlighted new and interesting sites on the web. Yahoo bid the service farewell at the start of the new year, on January 1.
Sites such as Yahoo Picks used to be a big hit, but interest in such sites has waned over the past few years. The reason is likely the development of the web. Back in the web’s infancy, everything hadn’t yet been done, and search engines weren’t all that reliable. These days however, it seems like new and creative ideas for websites are far and few between. It seems as though everything has already been done, so there’s little usual sites to point out.
Add that with the fact that search engines such as Yahoo, Google, MSN, Ask and so on have progressed far beyond the primitive search of the mid-1990’s, and well, a site like Yahoo Picks just doesn’t seem to fit in this day and age.
While it is sad to see a remnant of the early web days fade into the past, there does come a time to move on. Yahoo clearly thought that 2008 was the year to let it slip quietly into the past. While it is not likely to be removed completely from the web, rather it will just be left unupdated, should it one day full disappear we’ll always have the Wayback Machine.
