WebProNews

You can almost hear the "snip-snip" of cost-cutting scissors at work.  Following the forced departure of 1,500 employees last Wednesday, Jumpcut and Kickstart, two of Yahoo's more experimental and less popular sites, are facing similar fates.

Jumpcut is a video-editing site that's still available in a limited form.  A post on the site even states, "We will be keeping the Jumpcut site up and running for the foreseeable future so you'll still be able to play, remix and share your existing movies."  But it continues, "[Y]ou just won't be able to upload anything new," and recommends that users have a look at Flickr.

 

Yahoo acquired Jumpcut in September of 2006.  Considering that the service never made it out of beta, stopping its development seems like a reasonable move.

As for Kickstart, it's been around since at least August of 2007, and as a would-be Facebook/LinkedIn competitor, stood an even smaller chance of success.  Now Kickstart's homepage only shows a woman staring at a dim light bulb - perhaps about to turn it off.

On a practical level, now that Yahoo's 1,500 employees smaller than it was a week ago, holding onto every project would be insane.  The specifics of these new cuts are a good sign that Yahoo's correctly targeting dead ends, and hat tips go to Stuart Turton and Robin Wauters.