Browsing tag

Mash

Mash smashed!

August 31, 2008

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:

“Dear Mash users,

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 curious enough to try it out, 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 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!

Here comes Mash

September 18, 2007

Looks like a carnival of social network sites is on… now joining the bandwagon is yet another big player – MASH which is the new social networking site from Yahoo. Yahoo announced its new venture MASH on Friday & currently beta version of it is on, wherein people are invited for mashing on this site. I tried visiting the site but currently it says only by invitation.

So, whats you first reaction? Atleast I reacted like eh… yet, another social networking site! How is it going to be different from the current ones? When there is already an Orkut, why do I need to move to another site unless & until there is something really different and interesting over there. Anyways apart from Orkut, there are currently n number of general social networking sites like, fropper.com, minglebox.com, facebook.com, yaari.com, zhoom.com & many such similar x, y, z.coms & not to forget those professional networking sites like linkedin.com, ryze.com etc. Well, every such new site during launch claims that its different & something really new but alas the end product is pretty much same with no innovation at all. Classical example of this is bigadda.com! They spent such huge money on advertising this site but the end product? Well, its really sad…forget about being different, bigadda is not having even those very much required social networking features also. So, gimme one good reason as to why I should migrate to some other similar site when I am already settled & happy with my friends networking on Orkut or with my professional acquaintances on linkedin?

Despite it being a very general statement, most of the site launchers are failing to understand one very basic rule – user needs some real good reason for migrating & getting hooked on to some new site. Something different, something new & something persuasive enough! All those wannabe sites who think that by just changing the UI color or the font design, they will become yet another orkut are just dreaming something near to impossible. Huh, so let’s wait & watch what Yahoo has got in store for us now. However the kind of Yahoo fan I am, I would surely expect something cool coming out of them… Hope Mash is mashing enough like other cool tools like yahoo messenger & mails J.