Back in May 2010, Yahoo! bought Koprol, a location-based social networking site based in Indonesia.
There were even plans to also bring Koprol to the Philippines and this was during the time when social check-in services like FourSquare was just starting to become popular.
However, developments in Yahoo! early this year prompted the company to lay off thousands of employees and that includes some developers in South East Asia (specifically the ones involved with Koprol).
In a blog post at the Koprol blog today, the team officially announced that the service will be discontinued by August 28 this year. The remaining months will probably be allocated to allow users to export their profiles and accounts and migrate somewhere else.
The Koprol acquisition was sign of hope to a lot of developers in the region since it gave the impression that Yahoo! was serious in its support for start-ups and the growth in SEA. It’s just sad to hear that Yahoo! would buy and eventually kill a promising start-up. It’s not that uncommon, really. Yahoo! has bought and killed a lot of cool sites over the years. Koprol is just one of many.
too bad for yahoo. about a year ago i was part of a team supposedly to develop web services for koprol’s location based services.