With the economic sputtering and everyone engaged in belt-tightening, it’s interesting to see a growing number of online giants start to purge their services portfolio.
Google kicked things off by turfing Dodgeball, Google Notes and Jaiku, while Lycos has announced it will close Tripod and Lycos Mail as it moves to “discontinue all unprofitable services”.
This is just the tip of the iceberg as economic pragmatism takes root within the Web 2.0 world. Services that aren’t showing enough growth or/or generating sufficient revenue and profits are going to be closely scrutinized rather than being allowed to stay on life support.
You can call it a purge or house-cleaning but it’s healthy move that will reduce some of the noise, provide surviving players with some much-needed room, and, hopefully, inspire of the employees being let go to reload and start their own start-ups.
It will be interesting to see what News Corp., Yahoo and AOL do over the coming months given their extensive online portfolios. Yahoo, in particular, could do some serious reloading by selling asset it sees as non-core (e.g. del.icio.us) and closing down units that are struggling to survive.
TechCrunch has more details on the Lycos decision.
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CORRECTION – The original TechCrunch article posted by Michael Arrington pertains to products and services offered by Lycos Europe and has absolutley nothing to do with the Lycos Tripod and Lycos Mail business units offered through Lycos operations in the U.S. A completely separate entity from Lycos Europe, Lycos Inc. (www.lycos.com) continues to operate social media, publishing and search services including both Tripod and Lycos Mail. Currently, Tripod is the #17 social networking site worldwide (comScore MM Dec. 2008), with millions of member pages hosted, published and visited each month.
Mr. Arrington has since corrected the posting. For Lycos’s statement, go to: http://www.buzz.lycos.com/index.blog?entry_id=1874608
– Kathy O’Reilly, Director of Public Relations, Lycos, Inc.