Yahoo to pull the plug on Y!Live in December

Cyndy Aleo-Carreira — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 15:35:25 -0500

Y!Live, one of the projects from Yahoo's Brickhouse, has been killed, according to an announcement on the Y!Live blog. According to the post, the project's last day will be December 3, 30 days from today. Y!Live has been a relatively popular webcasting platform for social media personalities like Wayne Sutton.

There is no indication that the axing has anything to do with the Yahoo layoffs or earlier restructuring talk, but it seems a bit out of character for Yahoo to kill a project that was actually riding the current "hip" trend of social media broadcasting. Y!Live was launched in February of this year, making it slightly less than 6 months from launch to crater.

Of course, other social media broadcasting companies are also coming under scrutiny for layoffs and lack of a revenue stream, such as press darling Seesmic. Still, it seems odd for Yahoo to kill the project outright rather than rolling it into another division or form.

The Y!Live announcement also mentions Brickhouse's Fire Eagle, the platform for location-aware services, which is still moving forward. A quick scan of Yahoo APIs and Web Services at the bottom of the Yahoo Developer page for Y!Live shows Y!Live missing, but Fire Eagle has a registered trademark.

While the Y!Live post also thanks the "strong community," it entreats the user to keep watching for the next Brickhouse project. Let's hope it lasts longer than Y!Live did.

Screencap of Wayne Sutton on Y!Live courtesy Louis Gray.