Yahoo has announced that its shutting down Yahoo Stars India and 11 other services. Other services to shut down include AltaVista, Yahoo Axis, Yahoo Browser Plus, Citizen Sports, Yahoo WebPlayer, FoxyTunes, YahooRSS Alerts, Yahoo Neighbors Beta, Yahoo Downloads Beta, Yahoo Local API and Yahoo Term Extraction API. What's surprising is Yahoo had launched Yahoo Stars India only about 1.5 years ago and is shutting down on July 25, 2013 while still in Beta stage. We suppose the service never took off for Yahoo, however, in a blogpost, Jay Rossiter, EVP, Platforms at Yahoo indicated that Yahoo is shutting down these services in order to focus on more important products. Yahoo Stars India was a celebrity updates aggregator which allows users to browse through the latest updates, articles, images, and videos related to their favorite Bollywood and Cricket celebrities. It aggregated updates from Twitter and Yahoo Properties. Users could follow a celebrity to get updates on them in the form of tweets, news items, photos, videos, among others. When we checked the Yahoo Stars website, it greeted us with following message: Thank you for using Yahoo! Stars. To help focus our efforts on core Yahoo! product experiences, we will discontinue Yahoo! Stars by 25-Jul-2013. You can find more details here. Yahoo, in its blogpost, directs users to use Yahoo India OMG to stay updated on celebrities. Launched in 2010, Yahoo India OMG is a celebrity gossip site which showcases Indian content, with content from wires, including Reuters, Associated Press. It also features celebrity photos, videos, among others. Similar…
