It's been an eventful few days at Yahoo! as the search engine loses yet more prominent staff.Last Thursday, Jeremy Zawodny, one of the developers on the Yahoo Developer Network and well known for his blog, announced that he was leaving Yahoo!. In a blog post yesterday, he revealed that he was moving to Craigslist, stating: "I realized that Craigslist is a pretty unique combination of things: a small company with a solid financial base, a great service that I use myself, a focused groups of people who really care about doing things well, and an open-source friendly environment.".
Then it was announced that Stewart Butterfield, one of the creators of Flickr (which was also bought in 2005 by Yahoo!), has decided to leave Yahoo! as well. His resignation email has since been leaked and in it he states: "I don't know what you and the other executives have planned for this company, but I know that my ability to contribute has dwindled to near-nothing."
The week's events for Yahoo! didn't stop there as it was exposed yesterday that Joshua Schachter, the founder of Delicious, the social bookmark site bought by Yahoo! in 2005, had also resigned.
These are but the latest in a long list of names leaving Yahoo! since Microsoft announced an interest in acquiring the search giant back in February. It's not just been the big names leaving either, as Yahoo! has cut over 1,000 staff in the past few months and has also announced intentions to move its UK operations to Switzerland as a cost-cutting measure.
Yahoo!'s recent paid search deal with Google may buoy the fortunes of the search pioneer in 2008, but the loss of such big names is only going to add to the questions and conjecture regarding Yahoo's future.
