A bit of sad news (except it’s not really that sad), now, for people who use Yahoo Go, because according to PCWorld, Yahoo are discontinuing that Java-based service as of January 12th, 2010. So, if you do use it, expect to get some notifications of it not being available from Yahoo, very soon.
So, why are Yahoo discontinuing it?
Well, to put it simply, the mobile arena has changed by a very, very, very, very considerable amount since Yahoo Go first got punted out into the world. Back then, in 2006, the mobile internet wasn’t the huge and fertile battleground it is now. Oh sure, feature phones could access the internet, but how many of you used them for that? I’d hazard a guess at saying not that many.
And so, that was the world stage that Yahoo Go popped into existence on. For anyone who’s never used it, it’s a Java app, that acts as a on-stop portal to the web of the wide world but, and this is important, it didn’t need a browser.
It just connected you directly to the content you wanted, without needing to go through a separate browser. And although it never had a massive take-up, it was nice to use.
So what happened? Well, quite simply, proper mobile browsers happened. Safari happened. Skyfire happened. Webkit happened. But, of course, there’s the big one, and it’s an app that also began life in 2006. Put simply, if you want the biggest cause, I reckon it’s because Opera Mini, the single most downloaded mobile app in history, happened. Y’see, the whole point of Yahoo Go was that it offered something useful that mobile browsers just couldn’t, so it was only ever going to be successful as long as mobile browsers were rubbish.
To boil it down to one really simple reason: mobile browsers stopped being rubbish.
And so, Yahoo are shuttering their Go service, and concentrating their efforts on their own web portal designed to be viewed, you guessed it, on a phone’s web browser. It’s utterly the right move for Yahoo to make. After all, if you’re using Opera Mobile on an HTC HD2, or the Mozilla browser (which is, at the moment, as close as we’ve got to Mobile Firefox) on the Nokia N900, you’re just not going to download another app, that does something your browser already does, but not as well as the browser…
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