It is said that things go wrong because people build walls instead of bridges. Yahoo’s battling social-networking service Mash, will pull down the doors on September 29th, according to an email sent to users.
And as a result, the existing profiles of the members would no longer be available. Yahoo is notifying all its users to save any data they want to keep for the future before it ends.
Yahoo will smash Mash after one year in favor of a new profile service to “make all of Yahoo more social.” Yahoo did not provide any detail about the new service or when it will launch, but Mash included features similar to those on MySpace, Facebook and My Yahoo.
Last September, when Yahoo launched an invitation-only beta of something called Mash, CNet’s Rafe Needleman wrote, “Yahoo’s new social network, Mash, is appropriately named.
It feels like a mash-up of Facebook, MySpace, and Wikipedia. It has taken the best — or, at least, most popular — features from these services and put them together in a very compelling social service. “I strongly doubt it will suffer the same fate of that other social network, the failing Yahoo 360.” Hey, even Tiger Woods hits one out of bounds now and then.
Today, Yahoo announced that Mash will be trashed as of Sept. 29 and advised whatever users it still had to clean out their personal goods before then.
Mash began as Mosh, and first began testing the service in September 2007, making its foray into social networking, but changed its name to avoid a clash with Nokia’s service of the same name. It began in beta on September 14 last year and has never been given a full launch.
With a “Yahoo 360” struggling to keep running and a failed attempt to purchase Facebook — which, truth be told; would have been quite a feather in its cap — Yahoo then released the Mash to selected people outside of Yahoo’s walls.
Mash enables users to build online profiles and also start and change profiles for their friends. It has features similar to Facebook — a newsfeed showing what friends are up to and modules such as games and Flickr photo feeds.
Guessing by the Mash blog, improvement seems to have come to a halt since January, with no entries since then apart from yesterday’s closure announcement.
“We launched Mash as an experimental profile service with the goal of providing an interactive and social way of connecting with others,” said Yahoo spokesperson Devon Corvasce. “Yahoo has announced we will soon be launching a new profile experience (an upgrade to profiles.yahoo.com) to work across the network, in the effort to make all of Yahoo more social.”
Asked when the new service would launch, Corvasce said, “At this time, we are not publicly discussing the launch date of the new profile experience. You can look forward to seeing it in coming months.”
Matt Warburton, Yahoo Community manager, sent an e-mail to all the Mash members, thanking them for trying out the Mash Beta Service and hoped that they must have had lots of fun. He further mentioned that the company will shut down Mash on September 29, 2008 and as a result, the current profiles of the members would no longer be available.
This failure is the second major one for Yahoo where social networking is concerned. In 2007, the company had to shut down a mobile social site called “Mixd,” which only lived to be a few months old.