Yahoo Livestand

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

~ the obit ~

livestand was the kind of thing aspirational us ipad owners were supposed to use. i was not one of them. in late 2011 i was 27, working in ankara, and the ipad was a thing turkish early adopters were paying close to fifty percent over us retail to import. flipboard had already won the personalized-magazine category by then, and a yahoo me-too version of flipboard that shipped six months later and only ran on ipad had no realistic path to my screen.

yahoo announced livestand at the october 2011 mobile expo and shipped it in november of that year. the pitch was that you would open the app every morning and see a magazine assembled out of your interests and recent reading history. it was meant to be your daily reader. yahoo had built a recommendation engine called c.o.r.e. (content optimization and relevance engine) and livestand was meant to be the consumer face of that engine.

the press at launch was muted. flipboard had been out since july 2010 and zite had launched in early 2011 with a similar pitch. livestand arrived as the third entry in a category that already had a winner. its app store rating climbed to four stars on average. yahoo still never reported a download figure it was willing to put a press release around.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ how it landed ~

livestand was a marissa-mayer-era product in spirit but predated her arrival. when livestand shipped it was carol bartz's yahoo. by the time it died it was scott thompson's yahoo on its way to ross levinsohn's interim yahoo. the strategy of throwing mobile apps against the wall predated mayer by about three years. yahoo was burning roughly one ceo per year at this point. blake irving ran consumer products and livestand was his initiative. the lifespan of any single project was tied to the lifespan of whichever executive owned it.

~ the cracks ~

scott thompson resigned on may 13, 2012 after a falsified-degree scandal in his bio. ross levinsohn took over as interim ceo. his first major product decision, twelve days into the job, was to kill livestand. the official line was that yahoo would refocus on mobile fundamentals rather than standalone tablet apps. the actual reading was that livestand had never crossed whatever internal threshold yahoo had set, and a new ceo wanted to clear the books before announcing his own roadmap.

marissa mayer arrived two months later as the next ceo. her own slate of mobile apps from acquisitions like summly and messageme would replace what levinsohn had cleared. each one would die in its own way over the following four years.

~ what replaced it ~

c.o.r.e., the recommendation engine, was the actual asset under livestand and it mostly stayed inside yahoo. some of the personalization tech ended up in yahoo news and the yahoo homepage. by 2014 the explicit c.o.r.e. branding had been retired and the underlying systems had been absorbed into whatever data platform yahoo was calling its recommendation stack that quarter. the ipad-only consumer face of the technology was gone in six months. the technology itself lived a few more years before dissolving back into the bureaucratic layer it had come from.

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