Last year I had written about Yahoo launching its social networking site “Mash” and it’s not even an year now when I get this mailer that Yahoo is closing down Mash! Curious enough to know the reason I landed up on Yahoo blog and here is the official statement from Yahoo mentioned in their blog:
You may have received an email recently regarding the shut-down of Mash on September 29, 2008. To provide more information about what will happen to your Mash profile, and how you can save your profile information, please see the list of FAQs below.
Thank you for trying out our Mash Beta service. We hope you had fun with it!
Matt Warburton
Yahoo! Community Manager”
When Mash was launched last year in September, I remember the membership was through invitation only and I requested one of my friends to send me the invite. Think “join only through invite” was introduced to keep that exclusivity as compared to any other networking site but well just that exclusivity doesn’t make any user to stick to any site esp. when users have hoards of other options to cater to their needs. It can definitely instigate one to register immediately but then you need to have some content or reasons to keep users engaged to any site. I had some hopes with Mash as this was a Yahoo product but well we all know the fate and doomed performance of Yahoo products these days, be it the new mail, yahoo search or their social networking sites, all are not able to compete against their giant competitor Google! After joining Mash, I had hardly visited it for maybe 5-6 times and so it doesn’t come to me as a surprise now that Yahoo had decided to shut it down. Frankly speaking there was nothing in it for me as a user to go to that site again and again. Apparently I wasn’t the only one who felt the same and Mash traffic slope has been on downside ever since its launch last year. Infact quantcast graph for Yahoo Mash shows estimated monthly page view count around 2,000 only!!! Well, if that’s the embarrassing pageview count for Mash then it means that its being used by almost none! Considering the reviews and performance I think it makes sense for Yahoo to shut the product down. Sad that yet another social networking site and that too from Yahoo reaches extinction!
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3 comments :
i remember your blog on social networking sites. u had mentioned mash there n tht was the 1st n last time i heard of this site :) n its already smashed before i cud take a look at it :))one day all the social netwrkin sites shall recieve the same fate s people will be bored of them
I am one of the few users of Mash.. Actually I had account on Yahoo! 360 and it seemed pretty nifty. But then the ultimate social networking truth: Only the biggest shall survive spelt doom for 360.
Mash was ok but too little too late!
@Abhishek: Thanks for dropping by and yea I agree only biggest will survive. Mash was not having any key differentiator
@Tellmeyourdreams: :-), agreed if these sites will not invent anything users are bound to get bored!
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