Yahoo! Swallows Social News Startup Snip.It

The revamp of Internet giant Yahoo! under the leadership of CEO Marissa Mayer continues after it acquired Snip.it, a social tool that allows users to share online news and other web content.

Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, although according to AllThingsDigital Yahoo is paying “mid teens” of millions of dollars for the company.

Clipping Acquisition

Snap.it is a startup that allows online users to collate and share web articles and content. It was founded in 2011 by an Egyptian Ramy Adeeb, who according to Reuters, during the Egyptian revolution became frustrated at Twitter and its ability to easily share articles with other online users about Middle East politics.

“We are excited to share some big news: Snip.it has been acquired by Yahoo!,” reads a posting on the Snip.it website. “For the past year and a half, we’ve worked tirelessly as a team to build the best social news platform on the web. We’ve been absolutely blown away by the breadth, depth and quality of the content you guys share on Snip.it every day.”

“We are thrilled at the opportunity to bring Snip.it’s vision to a larger scale at Yahoo!,” said the posting. “While we can’t share the specifics of what we’ll be building, we are excited about the opportunity to take social news to new, exciting heights at Yahoo!. The Yahoo! team is passionate about inspiring and entertaining the world’s daily habits, and certainly sharing news and information is something we all do every day. The vision and energy at the company is contagious, and we’re so excited to be part of all that is to come.”

But it seems that the existing Snip.it customers will be cut off next month, with existing customers being urged to export their snips that were created using its service. Presumably these customers will migrate to rival offerings such as Clipix.

“As of today, we will no longer support snipping,” reads the posting. “However, we’ve built a few options for you to download and export all your snips. The download link will be available until February 21, 2013.”

New Talent

So why exactly is Yahoo! acquring Snap.it and then effectively shutting it down?

Well it seems to be part of the drive of new boss Mayer to bring new talent into the company, who has previously stated that her aim is to increase the focus on mobile technologies.

Mayer joined Yahoo back in July, and since then she has sought to shake things up at the company.  She hired Google’s exec Henrique de Castro as the COO, and in December appointed “serial entrepreneur and angel investor” Max Levchin to the board. Levchin was a co-founder of PayPal.

The management changes come amid a number of other developments at Yahoo!. In October last year Mayer acquired mobile software developer Stamped, a New York start-up that had not even reached its second year of operations.

Stamped had created software that allowed friends to record and share favourite things, such as restaurants, music and books over their mobiles, by placing a “stamp” on them.

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