Last month, Yahoo Mash was shut down before ever leaving beta form. If you’ve never heard of Yahoo Mash, you’re not alone. It didn’t really catch on – hence the shut down. It was Yahoo’s attempt at a social network, presumably made to compete with MySpace, Facebook, and the like. That didn’t quite pan out.
They have not abandoned social media however. Today, they’ve entered a new phase in socializing, which looks to turn Yahoo as a whole into a more social entity. The social team is being headed by Jim Stoneham, who only joined the Yahoo team six weeks ago according to TechCrunch.
Yahoo users get a new profile and the ability to create friendships with others, and different aspects of Yahoo will be integrated into the profiles. Stoneham discusses Yahoo’s new objective on the Yodel Anecdotal blog:
I want to make it clear that this new profile is not intended to be a new social destination on Yahoo!. Rather, our plan is to integrate “social” as a central dimension into the services you use every day. For example, if you’re on Yahoo! Messenger 9.0, you’re already seeing Yahoo! Buzz, Mybloglog, and Twitter updates as part of your friends’ status messages. Soon you’ll see social capabilities added elsewhere across Yahoo!, beginning with places where you start your day. The new homepage we’re testing will soon have an application that lets you stay up to date with what your friends are doing across the Web. And Yahoo! Mail will be delivering a smarter inbox, displaying emails from your most important connections first.
This appears to be a smart move on Yahoo’s part. There’s no question that the web as a whole is turning more social by the day, and this is a good way to keep users interested in using their services. Unfortunately, I still see this as more of a way to keep current users around than to pull them away from competitors. It will be interesting to see how this pans out for the company. The way it’s marketed could have a lot of bearing on how much new traffic Yahoo gets out of it.
Users can get started updating their Yahoo profiles by simply going to profiles.yahoo.com.
