Not so Delicious: Yahoo! to close several features

Yahoo! is to cut some prominent website features following the announcement this week that it is firing some 600 workers, or 4 per cent of its workforce, as the struggling internet pioneer tries to re-invent itself.

While many of the targeted features have been little used, some, like the Delicious bookmark sharing service, have proved popular among Yahoo users, who fired off messages of disappointment on Friday.

"RIP Delicious: you were so beautiful to me," lamented blogger Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb.com, who eulogised the service that Yahoo bought in 2005 as one of the best ways to archive and datamine the internet. "So much value. So unappreciated. So tragically lost."

Other Delicious enthusiasts launched a Twitter campaign to save the service, but there was little such activism for the other features to be canned by the struggling internet pioneer, such as the news sharing service Yahoo Buzz, MyBlogLog and AltaVista, which had been a top search engine before the advent of Google.

Yahoo! has confirmed the closings. "We're actively thinking about the future of Delicious and we believe there is a home outside the company that would make more sense for the service, our users and our shareholders," it said in a statement.

"Part of our organisational streamlining involves cutting our investment in underperforming or off-strategy products to put better focus on our core strengths and fund new innovation in the next year and beyond," it added.