Yahoo! Buzz! Given! Mercy! Bullet!

Yahoo! is pulling the plug on its Buzz service, making it the latest service/product/wild goose chase to be shuttered by the company.

Buzz was a Digg-alike service, which allowed users to flagup content, and add their own headlines. Thus it was that last December Buzz users were informed they could expect: "Nonce Pope to deliver Christmas message on the BBC".

However, even that level of erudition was not enough to ensure the feature's survival as Yahoo! continues to trim the fat from its business. The fact that the service will be put to death in time for Easter is, we're sure, purely coincidental.

A posting on the Yahoo! Buzz topics page today read:

Yahoo! Buzz will be discontinued as of April 21, 2011. As of this date, you will be unable to access the Yahoo! Buzz site. This was a hard decision. However this will help us focus on our core strengths and new innovations.
We appreciate your patronage.
The Yahoo! Buzz Team

Yahoo! put a number of services on death watch back in December, including Buzz, MyBlogLog and AltaVista. Delicious is on the sell list, with a sale expected any day now for the last few months.

MyBlogLog will be shut as of 24 May. AltaVista appears to be still online, giving young people a hint as to what the web looked like in the last century. ®