Yahoo! Gallery

» see gallery.yahoo.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

On 7 March 2006, at O'Reilly's Emerging Technology conference, Yahoo opened four more of its services to outside developers and put up a place to show the results. The page described itself in one line: discover and share applications that use Yahoo technologies. Ash Patel, the chief product officer then, said developers played an important role in enhancing Yahoo's network of services. The logo on the page said beta, and it never stopped saying beta for the next three years.

What it held was a sorted list of other people's work. Each Yahoo property got a section, and by late 2008 that meant Answers, Astra, Flickr, Mail, Maps, Messenger, MyBlogLog, OpenID, Shopping, Travel, Upcoming, Delicious and YUI, among others. You browsed by tag, you rated things out of five stars on a scale that ran from Hated it to Loved it, and the counters showed downloads and visits. The Maps section carried 300 applications from 101 developers. Messenger had 178 plug-ins from 62. Flickr had 174 from 140, which is a ratio that tells you most Flickr developers shipped exactly one thing and then stopped.

The ending was announced on 17 June 2009 and the wording is a small classic of the form. After careful consideration, Yahoo said, it had decided to close the Yahoo Gallery beta service; the Gallery had gained a core of loyal users who enjoyed it, but Yahoo was reprioritizing some products to help deliver the best possible experiences to consumers and developers. Developers got a My Applications page where they could download the images and text of their own submissions before the lights went out. Nothing was offered to replace it.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the messenger shelf, and why I was not on it ~

The most consumer-facing corner of the Gallery was the Yahoo Messenger plug-in section, which wanted version 8.0 or later and promised to deliver the stuff you want right into your chat window. That was the one part of this a normal person would have had a reason to open. In Turkey, nobody did, because in Turkey the messenger was MSN. It was MSN at home on TTNet, MSN in the internet cafes, MSN through university. Yahoo was something I had an account on for mail and nothing else, so an app store bolted onto the Yahoo chat client was a shelf in a shop I walked past.

~ the week Yahoo cleaned house ~

Carol Bartz took over as chief executive in January 2009 and the closures started immediately. Yahoo My Web went on 18 March, Briefcase on 30 March, and then came the pair in July: Yahoo 360 on the 13th and the Gallery on the 14th, one day apart. Farechase, Kickstart, Live, Pets and Yahoo for Teachers went the same year, and GeoCities followed on 26 October. The Gallery was one of the quieter names on a long list.

The last live capture of the front page is from 19 June 2009, two days after the closure was public, and it shows nothing unusual at all. Browse Applications, Search Applications, Highly Rated Developers, Latest applications, and a line asking whether you had any suggestions about Yahoo Gallery. No farewell page was ever archived. The next capture of that address is already the redirect.

~ the previous tenant ~

gallery.yahoo.com had a life before this one. From 2000 to around 2005 it was Yahoo Picture Gallery, a clip-art and stock-photo directory with category paths like Animals and Pets, offering pictures to use for your homepages, greeting cards, clubs, briefcases and auctions. It 404'd in January 2006 and the hostname was handed to the developer directory two months later. Today it is a 301 to the Yahoo front page, which is the third thing that address has been.

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