Yahoo kills Livestand iOS news app as part of ‘consolidation’

In November, Yahoo launched the Livestand iOS app, a much-hyped “living magazine.” Only a few months later, the company has shuttered the product. Executives announced during Yahoo’s latest earnings call that it would be discontinuing a number of its products in an effort to consolidate the company’s focus, and Livestand is one of the first casualties. In addition to providing a Flipboard-style personalized magazine, Yahoo sought to re-create its portal model in the app, allowing publishers to easily create digital magazines within Livestand — the paradigm never caught on, and neither app nor platform gained the foothold that Flipboard, Zite, and a handful of others were able to achieve.

In its announcement of the closure, which comes all of two days after the (again much-hyped) launch of the Axis browser plug-in, Yahoo did reiterate that it remains committed to a “mobile-products-first development model.” Hopefully the company’s learned its lesson after its previous mismanagement of communities like Flickr, and is committed to trying to figure out the mobile landscape — even if there are a few false starts along the way.