Yahoo takes Mash out of the mix
By Dave Jeyes
Yahoo has decided to shutter its Mash social networking service in another botched attempt at competing with Myspace and Facebook. Mash will go offline on September 29, less than a year after it launched and months after Yahoo stock dropped in the wake of the botched Microsoft deal.
Yahoo Mash was only the most recent of the company’s attempts to enter the social networking arms race. Yahoo launched its 360 service in 2005 and then decided to launch Mash while their original service was still in use. Yahoo 360 was also laid to rest earlier in the year.
All the while, Yahoo has also been attempting to acquire a successful social network for its stable. After failed overtures toward Facebook and Bebo in the same timeframe, Yahoo users became indifferent to the noise coming from the company’s Sunnyvale headquarters.
Yahoo Mash pinned its hopes on a viral marketing strategy, by allowing users to create profiles for their friends. Other users also had the ability to modify your profile colors and formatting, which made it hard for users to identify with the profile as their own online space. Mash’s distinct lack of applications and widgets made the site even less engaging to users.
The social networking market continues to be dominated by the top players, Facebook and Myspace. It is becoming increasingly difficult to lure away both users and developers to new social networks. The sheer saturation of the top 2 sites with users and the drudgery of managing another social profile outweigh the promise of new features, especially as their platforms mature.
The number 2 web property has been reeling since an unseemly rebuff of Microsoft’s acquisition attempts earlier in the year. That combined with steady declines in Search market share and a fumbled launch of their Panama display advertising system this year, Yahoo is struggling to find direction.
Below is the email announcement directly from Yahoo:
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Stumble It!
August 29th, 2008
It’ll be great if we could all have some type of universal profile that we can plug into different social network sites.
This would make life much easier!
September 2nd, 2008
I agree. That seems to be that tact that Google is taking with their forthcoming Friend Connect distributed profile system. There’s no launch date yet for that, though.