Yahoo Mash gets smashed, bashed, quashed

My Yahoo Mash profile, soon to get euthanized.

(Credit: Yahoo)

File this one under the "ouch" category. Yahoo is shutting down its social-networking experiment, Yahoo Mash, after only a year in business.

An e-mail to Mash members from Yahoo community manager Matt Warburton read, "Thank you for trying out our Mash Beta service. We hope you had fun with it. Please note that we will shut down Mash on September 29, 2008. As a result, your current profile on Mash will no longer be available."

Mash didn't really offer anything new, other than the fact that instead of inviting friends you created profiles for them and then invited them to customize and change them. You could also add "modules," a sort of rudimentary version of social-network apps. It was designed as a quirky, cute step up from Yahoo 360, the social network that Yahoo had based off its millions of pre-existing user accounts; if Yahoo 360 was analogous to AOL profiles, Mash was more like Facebook.

But Mash never caught on, and its parent company has now deemed it worth closing.

This is not the first time that Yahoo has launched an experimental social network only to yank it. Last year, Yahoo shut down a Dodgeball- or Brightkite-like mobile social site called "Mixd" that had only been in operation for a few months.

[mel2surf]

Hi my comment is: Yahoo used to be the king in my book,back when they were innovative and had great functions like the comments on news stories,like the LIVE personals ads...seems slowly but surely they have gotten way too conservative(news slanted toward the conservative side too) and friggin boring.

Sorry,but this is IMHO. Seems yahoo gets rid of each good function one by one and makes former greats like yahoo messenger worse and worse and more bloated and filled with more useless system-draining functions that I never use..ex: I don't WANT a crap "radio station",or big goofy emoticons that dance around and make coffee for you...SMALL emoticons would be FINE..I like LESS features and MORE stability and reliability.I'd be thrilled at a lean powerful yahoo messenger with video chat! without all the crap.I still love u guys,cause we go back to 1999,but I am finally venting ;-) I wonder if yahoo will ever make a come back. Have a nice day. Apologies if this comment is not in the right place.

[yacahuma]

This is interesting from a web developer entrepreneur point of view. I dont know is Mash was better than Facebook since I dont use either. BUT, I competed locally with another established website and lost, even though my website was far superior. It definitively important to be the first to market when taking about Internet Apps. Most people are too lacy to move away if they have all they need.

[internetcomments]

Pulling the plug out of a user-driven service is always a bad idea. If a service is uncool, it will die a natural dead because people will decide for themselves not to put any more effort in an uncool unpopulated social website.

But bluntly deciding that for whatever (commercial) reason all user contributed content can simply be wasted just like that, has an unavoidable and very unpleasant effect for Yahoo:

If this is their style of dealing with their customers, people will just never again trust any other service from them anymore. And that's quite bad in a (tech-)world where offering reliable social networks is the foremost approach to nowadays goldmine and scarcity: audience attention.

[NWLB]

Yeah. Not getting Yahoo was such a loss for Microsoft. lol

[dlclc]

Yahoo was a pioneer, but not anymore.

[zeplin10ten]

mashed po'-dud-ohs

[JamiLeeD]

Yahoo! had a social networking component? I generally find out about these types of things, but this is the first I've heard of one from the big Y.

[Epiz76]

Yahoo should learn to slim their products down a notch. This has obviously done more harm than good.

[rootsmusic]

Yahoo also smashed MingleNow, which was a social networking experiment that it'd acquired (http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-9830888-2.html)