Say goodbye to Yahoo! Mash

On today's web, so many social sites never get off the ground because users don't easily migrate from their online communities. As much as I want MySpace to die, people will still be using it as long as their friends are using it.

Yahoo's mashup social network had a promising start, but it quickly dropped off. Almost a year ago, I wrote a post about how interactive it was, and how addicted I was to it. I remember going to the site 20 times a day because other people had the ability to update my profile page. I could drag around widgets and import feeds.

I actually said, “It’s more mature than MySpace, more interactive than Virb, and more interesting than Facebook.”

I haven't logged in since last September, primarily because none of my network has moved over from Facebook. Today Yahoo! killed the project:

Dear Yahoo! Mash member,

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. We strongly recommend that you return to http://mash.yahoo.com and copy the content that you wish to save onto a separate document.

For a list of FAQs, please refer to the Mash Help Page.

Thanks for trying out Mash!

Matt Warburton Yahoo! Community Manager

I'm glad Yahoo! isn't wasting any more resources on this project. It was a cool idea, and the technology behind it is fascinating, but they didn't apply it effectively. Instead of rolling out a separate social network, why not integrate social features into sites like Flickr, Upcoming, or Delicious?