Internet firm Yahoo! has decided to kill its Yahoo! Go phone application after perhaps sensing that more users were going directly to its mobile homepage instead of downloading the mobile tool.

The Sunnyvale, California-based company has announced that Yahoo! Go would be discontinued on January 12, 2010 and that users can no longer run Yahoo! Go 2.0 or 3.0 from their mobile phone after that date.

As an alternative to Yahoo! Go, the tech firm urged users instead to visit its mobile homepage using the mobile browser of their mobile devices.

It is not known how many people used Yahoo! Go, a mobile portal that allowed users to access different Yahoo services such as email and news, before the decision was made to shut it down for good.

In a company brief provided by Yahoo Southeast Asia, the tech firm hinted that the rapid developments that have transpired in the mobile industry have rendered Yahoo! Go somewhat irrelevant to the needs of the consumers.

“As a part of Yahoo!’s push to develop compelling mobile experiences, the company will be developing more robust mobile experiences like the new award-winning Yahoo! Mobile homepage,” it said.

Yahoo said it would only “build applications for the platforms where it makes sense to do so,” considering the work and effort that goes into developing applications for the fragmented mobile landscape.

“In parallel, we will develop sophisticated mobile browsing experiences to reach a large audience across a broad range of devices,” it said.

Its mobile homepage, the company added, “features dynamically updated content with pagination, an enhanced RSS reader that supports photos with captions and adds the ability to scroll through more headlines from favorite feeds without having to refresh content, email access from multiple accounts, easy access to social networking sites like Facebook, fuss-free uploading of photos to Flickr and more.”

More importantly, Yahoo said “ these services are available across multiple platforms on more than 1,900 devices, reaching the broadest audience possible.”

With Yahoo Go removed from its stable of products, the company said its priority now is to mobilize Yahoo.

This strategy, it pointed out, is evidenced by the recent launch of Flickr, Yahoo Finance, the existing applications for iPhone (Yahoo Mobile, Yahoo Messenger, Yahoo!Music), and voice search applications spanning devices across RIM, Microsoft Windows Mobile, and Nokia.