Hardly one year after it was launched, Yahoo! Mash will be shutting down. The experimental social network aspired to be a potential competitor to the hugely popular social sites such as Facebook and MySpace, but fell far short of this lofty target.
Matt Warburton, Yahoo’s community manager, sent an email to all Mash members in this regard. All current profiles on Mash will cease to exist from the 29th of September, when the site will be shut down. Members have been asked to copy and save any important data before that date.
Mash did not offer anything new to users and was never really promoted by Yahoo! This is the most likely reason for its failure to get a large user base. In fact, Yahoo! had merely adopted the most popular features from various other social sites. They even had a drag and drop layout design interface that blatantly mimiced Facebook.
Last year, Yahoo! shut down their mobile social site, Mixd, just a few months after it was launched. Yahoo! 360 was shut down earlier this year. However, rather than realising they have lost, Yahoo! continues to bluster around in the social networking space. They have now announced that they will launch another social networking site, SpotM, which will initially be released in India on a trial basis
India has a huge number of adolescents and teenagers who could be attracted to such an offering from Yahoo! Facebook and Orkut, though, are already very popular among Internet-savvy Indians, so it is highly unlikely that this new network will gain much traction. If SpotM is successful in India, by some miracle, it will later be released worldwide.
