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Yahoo! cuts! web! bookmarking! fat!

Three services? Too many. Two? Just right

Yahoo! has cut off another useless appendage.

On Friday, the struggling ad broker told the world that MyWeb, its four-year-old web bookmarking service, will be severed on March 18.

That means Yahoo! will now offer only two bookmarking services: Yahoo! Bookmarks and Delicious.

"As we have continued to innovate with the 2.0 release of Delicious and the upgraded Yahoo! Bookmarks," Yahoo! said with a post to the official Yahoo! Search Blog, "we saw that MyWeb users’ needs are being served by our newer products."

This is true - except for the fact that Yahoo! Bookmarks and Delicious are not newer products. Both pre-date MyWeb's June 2005 debut.

But you could say that Delicious is newer to Yahoo! It was acquired by the the company in December 2005. And Yahoo! Bookmarks got a face-lift in 2006. If you care.

The few Yahooholigans who actually use MyWeb will find that their MyWeb bookmarks are already available on Yahoo! Bookmarks. But the transition to Delicious requires a bit more effort.

The difference between the two? Yahoo! Bookmarks is for private online bookmark storage. Delicious is for those narcissistic enough to share their bookmarks with the rest of the world, Web2.0rhea-style.

Since the arrival of new CEO Carol Bartz in January, Yahoo! has exhibited a new interest in removing at least a modicum of extraneous appendages. Over the past three weeks, the company murdered the ten-year-old Yahoo! Briefcase, a service that provides 50MB of online storage; Yahoo! Pets, an animal lovers' portal launched in 1999; and Yahoo! Ads for RSS, a beta service for injecting contextual ads into syndicated content.

In December, Yahoo! announced a 10 per cent headcount cut, which will see 1,500 people lose their jobs. And at the end of January, word leaked that the company had frozen the pay of all employees who remain on-board. ®

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