Yahoo announces to shut down 'Mash'

Yahoo! as most popular and no.1 site on the internet, as per its user base and ranking has decided to close down its popular social networking service Yahoo! Mash, which is at present in the beta (test version) stage from September 29, 2008. Yahoo, in this regard has informed to mash users through email.

According email, which Yahoo community manager Matt Warburton has sent to mash users, “You may have received an email recently regarding the shut-down of Mash on September 29, 2008. Thank you for trying out our Mash Beta service. We hope you had fun with it.”

Yahoo official has also informed the mash users ‘how to protect your data base saved on mash profile?’

For this, Yahoo has stated, “All of the content on your Mash profile with the EXCEPTION of your profile photo, nickname, age, sex and location (if you’ve provided this information) will be unavailable starting September 29th, 2008. If you wish to save any of the information that’s currently available to you on Mash, we strongly recommend that you return to http://mash.yahoo.com immediately and copy the content that you wish to save onto a separate document.”

Yahoo has started this service just a year ago on an experimental basis decided to enhance its reach and to compete with other social networking sites especially ‘Facebook’.

Yahoo has not clarified the reason behind it, but as per sources ‘the facility of editing other’s profile may have one of the strong reasons behind it. Moreover, it could not succeed to pull other social networking site users into Mash.’

Yahoo, that has provided a wide range of services to its users has also shut down its several services. Mobile social networking site ‘Mixd’ that could online only few months and other pre-social networking site Yahoo!360 have also been shut down this year.

Yahoo had earlier also announced to shut down its one of the most popular photo service flickr.com, but it proved only speculation and later Yahoo had modified it by adding video services.