Yahoo! Stars India

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

~ the last words ~

Yahoo! Stars was India-only at the content layer, which puts it on the other side of a wall I cannot see over. In 2012 I was an engineer in Ankara with no reason to open the Indian celebrity web, the same way nobody in Mumbai had a reason to open donanimhaber. I know this product entirely through a shutdown banner, a MediaNama list and one January 2012 capture that still has the cricket navigation in it.

India that year had two celebrity economies that mattered and they did not overlap much. Film ran on Bollywood and sport ran on cricket, and following either one online meant a dozen tabs: a gossip site, a scorecard, the actor's own Twitter account, whatever the wire services had filed that morning. Yahoo! Stars was the attempt to collapse that into one address with a page per person.

The page was an aggregator in the pure sense. It pulled the celebrity's tweets, the photographs Yahoo's own properties had licensed, the video, the articles, and stacked them in reverse order under a header. The site description from January 2012 reads like a checklist of everything a fan might want in one place: photos, videos, tweets, audio, links. No editorial voice, no original reporting, just a funnel pointed at one famous person at a time.

It launched quietly in the first weeks of 2012, which the archive dates to 17 January, and it never shipped a 1.0. Eighteen months later it was still labeled beta. Yahoo India had a separate and better-known celebrity property running alongside it, Yahoo! India OMG, which was a gossip site with writers, launched in 2010 and doing the thing people actually came for. Stars was the machine version of the same idea, and it was competing internally with the human version.

~ the record ~

~ twelve at once ~

Marissa Mayer became Yahoo's chief executive in July 2012 and spent the following two years closing products in batches. The batch dated 25 July 2013 took twelve of them. AltaVista was in it, which is why that date is remembered at all, and so were Yahoo Axis, the browser plug-in, along with Browser Plus, Citizen Sports, the WebPlayer, FoxyTunes, RSS Alerts, two other betas and a pair of developer APIs.

Being bundled into an announcement with AltaVista is a specific kind of erasure. Every story written that day led with the search engine that had lost to Google, because that was the obituary readers wanted. The Indian trade press covered the rest, MediaNama listing all twelve by name, but outside India nobody wrote a word about Stars, and no English-language obituary of it exists anywhere. It had a wiki page on ArchiveTeam and a shutdown banner. That was the entire record.

~ the notice ~

The shutdown message is preserved and it is worth reading for the house style alone. "Thank you for using Yahoo! Stars. To help focus our efforts on core Yahoo! product experiences, we will discontinue Yahoo! Stars by 25-Jul-2013." The date format is the giveaway: 25-Jul-2013, written the way a database field prints, in a sentence meant for readers.

A separate notice dated 28 June 2013 pointed users at Yahoo! India OMG to stay current on celebrity news, which settles the internal argument in the plainest possible terms. The aggregator lost to the gossip site with staff. The crawl log agrees with the stated date without needing to be asked: stars.yahoo.com answers with a full page on 2 July 2013, and by 11 December that year the address is a redirect, and it stays a redirect for the next six years.

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