While most other outlets seem to be finding new ways to get more social, Yahoo! has accepted the fact that it is not their strong suit. Yahoo!’s social media project Yahoo! Mash is about to become a corpse. It appears that a lack of interest has caused the company to give up on it. Users of the social network received an email from Yahoo! saying:
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.
The only really surprising part about this move was hearing the name Yahoo! Mash brought up in the first place. It doesn’t often get the mention of your MySpaces and your Facebooks. Quite honestly, I had to think for a minute to even remember what it was.
Perhaps a lack of press attention contributed to its demise. It probably didn’t help that membership was based on invite only. Maybe Yahoo! gave up too fast. It was only launched less than a year ago, and never even made it out of beta. On the other hand, maybe people just don’t need another generic social network.
Chris Snyder at Wired notes, “Aside from some customizable modules similar to Facebook apps and a cleaner design than MySpace, the only unique feature was that you could update your friends’ pages similar to a wiki.”
There is a post on the Mash blog that features some frequently asked questions and answers with regards to the shut down, but there is not much insight into the exact reasons for it. The only information in the post concerns what will happen to user profiles and things of that nature.
You can tell how devastated users are over the demise of Yahoo! Mash when you see that the blog post about it has only 7 comments at this point. About three of them (debatably) mourn its loss.
