Yahoo Acquires Xobni For Address Book Boost

The folks at Yahoo have made another purchase this week with the group known as Xobni, here aiming for Smarter Contacts in a rather basic way. With this service, Yahoo will expand its current app user base with email and social services, taking expertise from the development team at Xobni for what must be assumed to be their own already-developed apps. This sort of acquisition is one of those made more for the talent, rather than the app the developers have in play.

With Xobni, Yahoo racks up a total of two (that we know of) businesses that they've acquired in so many days. This trend isn't new – they've been collecting startups and small groups of developers and services for several months now – and we bet you can guess who's behind it all. Earlier this week they purchased a group known for their short-movie sharing and power to take on Vine.

That same app – Qwiki, it's called, was seen by former Google higher-up Marissa Mayer. As Mayer is now the CEO of Yahoo, she's seen this and a variety of apps like it as powerhouses worthy of being picked up by this original search giant. With her aim to pick and choose some of the most powerful up and coming names in the app universe, Yahoo is positioned well for growing from without.

At the moment, according to Xobni itself, most of its services are about to be done for – or at least sucked up into Yahoo in full.

"Xobni is no longer accepting new purchases of premium products. This includes Xobni Pro, Xobni Enterprise, Xobni for Teams, the Xobni Salesforce Gadget, and the Xobni JIRA Gadget."

The full collection of licenses for services with Xobni will continue through July 2nd, 2014 – one year from now – while "Premium Support" for the full set of apps and services will continue "throughout the duration of your premium subscription." Nice of them, yes?