What the hell is Yahoo? No one knows. But it's definitely not in the business of events planning anymore, with the news that it's unceremoniously killing Upcoming.org after ten years.

Upcoming's founder, Andy Baio, is livid, on behalf of his creation and its devoted followers:

In Yahoo's typical fuck-off-and-die style, they're doing it with 11 days notice, no on-site announcement, and no way to back up past events.

Baio is working to archive the decade's worth of events the site cataloged, if only for nostalgia's sake—but what really matters here is an attitude of What the fuck is Yahoo doing that spreads as it makes teenage millionaires out of brats, and little else. Baio seems to think the only lesson here is never do business with the purple team:

In hindsight, selling Upcoming to Yahoo was a horrible mistake. Selling your company always means sacrificing control and risking its fate, and as we now know, online communities almost always fail after acquisition. (YouTube is the rare exception, albeit one with billion-dollar momentum.) But Yahoo was a particularly horrible steward for the community.

Baio says Yahoo had the chance to revive Upcoming and make it a geek calendar mecca, something singular on the web. Instead, it's getting flushed with other legacy detritus. Sounds a lot like Flickr, sans flushing (so far). So far, Marissa Mayer's job at Yahoo has been one of bloodletting and pissing off mothers. How long until Nick D'Aloisio writes a disenchanted post like this one?

Read Baio's requiem in its entirety here. [Waxy via Daring Fireball]