First came 360, launched in 2005 as an early attempt to get Yahoo into social networking, was unceremoniously shut down earlier this year. In 2006 Yahoo was unable to close a transaction with Facebook, despite being willing to pay up to $1.62 billion. Nor could they pull the trigger on a $1 billion Bebo deal (Bebo went to AOL for $850 million). Now Yahoo has shut down Mash, which launched less than a year ago and is best known for sporting a Darth Vader playing guitar and eating a banana image when it was in private beta.
Today, Yahoo emailed users notice that Mash will be shutting down on September 29, 2008.
Fifth time’s a charm they say (right?). Let’s hope the next grand strategy works out better than the first four.
Meanwhile, Yahoo Mash joins the deadpool.
Yahoo needs to focus. Shutting down marginal projects makes sense.
not launching marginal products in the first place makes even more sense.
Ah well, maybe they are starting to learn.
Mike, you say Yahoo is 0-4. Can you list the 4 misses please?
@Gill
Um, it’s clearly in the article, but:
1. 360
2. facebook acquistion
3. bebo acquisition
4. mash
Yahoo has good services, they just have no idea how to market them. All people hear about Yahoo is Google ads and Microsoft. Things consumers don’t care about. Investors maybe but Joe blow on the street doesn’t ever want to hear about ads.
Yang and Becker are like Waldo. When things go bad leaders stand up and deliver speeches that give confidence. Where is Yang or Becker giving people a vision for Yahoo. A real CEO would be on all the tech shows, be on TC selling the vision for the company giving users confidence.
That is the difference between Mark Cuban and Yang. Cuban would be on techcrunch explaining things and answering questions because that is what a CEO is suppose to do when things are not great.
I think you over estimate the importance of techcrunch outside the realm of small to unknown start-ups.
Who was talking about Yahoo Mash anyways, and who cares if they exist or not. Yahoo definitely needs to change their stratergy and build one product at a time, every Yahoo product seems to have some competition coming up over time from within the company and the earlier one’s shutting down.
How many more products are we going to see Yahoo shut down?
Yahoo continues to baffle me. Mash had lots of potential, but they never opened it up and the didn’t promote it very well. They still seem to have no direction. I’ve been using Mash since day one and 360 for over 2 years now and I hope they come out with something decent to replace them.
360 was indeed a nice one from their side. When the rumours came of itgetting shut down and people started going for different spaces and spots . And well lazy enuf to return back. and Now mash !. Yahoo needs to think twice before they launch something , if they are gonna scrap the same in a yeear or so.
I still think Yahoo is a powerhouse. But probably the same diversified portfolio that keep readers hooked to yahoo is also killing them. They really need to focus. Yahoo still is at no. 2 in search, probably 1st in messenger… but somehow they couldn’t ride the SN wave.
Mash sucked big time…
Just so you know, Yahoo 360 is still around. I don’t use it anymore, but apparently some people still do. There is a blog post from the 360 team talking about how the mash shutdown doesn’t affect Yahoo 360, but the plan is to still “transition” away from 360 in the future.
Is Yahoo Buzz the next one? I hear the buzz…
Y!Kickstart anyone?
kickstart.yahoo.com
Having run Community at Yahoo!, it is certainly not that they lack good ideas, rather that they have lost their entrepreneurial spirit. In recent years, Yahoo seems to be stuck innovating through acquisition vs innovation through ideas and passion. They have certainly acquired some interesting companies but then surrounded the inventors with structure, process and rules. Consider for a moment that GeoCities was acquired over a decade ago and they still haven’t earned back that investment. Yahoo Groups has failed to keep pace with Wikis or profile-based social networks. Yahoo photos was build in parallel with Flickr just to be shut down and then have the Flickr founds bail.
Yahoo has a fantastic chance to embrace OpenSocial with YahooOS and turn the network into and their search process into “social search” and differential itself from Google. All is not lost but it will require some bold, peanut butter-less management to empower risky ideas.
Good Luck Yahoo – would love to see the stock back at $34.
@michael arrington: “not launching marginal products in the first place makes even more sense”
are you sure? really really sure?
with such a capacity in terms of engineering, why not release small projects and test the waters? I agree, yahoo needs a better strategy for social networking, but:
mash was never actually “hard” launched, remaining always as a beta, or even as an open alpha. From the beginning it was pretty clear that yahoo did not intend to turn mash into its main social networking alternative.
how many ads/links/promotional links did you see pointing to mash? none
have you ever seen mash on the yahoo frontpage? never
it was a fail, sure, but it also good for big companies to release projects like mash, which can help understand your audience, test new features that otherwise would never be released/launched.
yes, i love yahoo.
I love Yahoo too.
it was only a test project by couple of interns. not even full time emps working on it. i wudnt count it as a big failure
360 is still live allows to create new signups. neither i got any notice from yahoo
Not a dead pool member 
Note that Google also has a bunch of projects that are more or less in the deadpool. Nothing wrong with that - not everything will turn to gold, not even from Google. Kudos for trying, but Yahoo need to work a bit more on these side projects.
I think that it is just another indication of the fact that Yahoo! fails to properly promote its properties (either in-house or acquired) to the users it could potentially reach. And it seems to be true for all the services, including Flickr, MyBlogLog, Upcoming, Delicious - while there is huge potential for these services to reach mainstream users on Yahoo, the company does not seem to help them at all.
Because Mike doesn’t work at Yahoo! let me fill in some of the details here…
The issue is the lack of a singular focus at Yahoo! that extends across multiple years and is led by a core team with full and unwavering support from the very top. So what happens is that an idea catches fire, somebody at the SVP level buys into it and all of sudden it becomes the flavor of the month with everybody from Sue to Jerry championing that product at every turn. Expectations for the product are well beyond the roadmap of the 7 person team. The product launches, the yahoo.com firehouse is turned onto it, the press release is written proclaiming that site z.yahoo.com had more traffic then its competition last month. Two months later the SVP of the groups sends an email to Sue and Jerry proclaiming success and gets a big promotion to Executive VP. Eight months later the team is disbanded, the site goes into maintenance mode, the Executive VP becomes CEO of a VC backed startup, and the seven team members who worked their ass off on the product are watching the stock sink from $30 to $18. Jerry and Sue are on to promoting the next set of mocks.
Its sad to watch our management destroy this incredibly valuable franchise.
Bingo!
Exactly on the point!
How is Yahoo! 0-4? Is Flickr, Delicious and Upcoming not social? What about the new Yahoo! Buzz? While I think Yahoo! has really fcked’up Flickr and Upcoming for the worst, they both seem to be continuing to be successful.
My be they will buy tvosz.com soon
Mash is lke a Prius. It started as a car and became the hybrid technology used in all of the toyotas. It wasn’t wasted time, a lot was learned from it.
I agree with that. However, eventually they need to take their learning and put it into a competitive product. The Prius sells, Mash didn’t/never would have.
They have money/talent, all the need is some vision.
http://www.schoolshift.com > Yahoo Mash
Kill yourself.
People love to point out Yahoo fails and show how it’s a big dumb company that can’t innovate. But Google’s even worse. What’s up with Lively? What’s up with Knol? Those take a lot more resources than Mash ever did. And they’ll end up in the same dead pool. (Android might do well, but my guess is it won’t be as innovative as the iPhone was.)
What’s pathetic is seeing big rich companies with tons of engineers try to do knock offs of existing business. Can’t any of these folks actually invent something new rather copy what real smart people came up with?
While they shutdown Mash, Yahoo should also consider doing the same to their Chat service. Yahoo chat is nothing but a bunch of adult advertising bots, I don’t think any real people chat there anymore. I used to use Yahoo chat and then would people to my 360 page whom I became friends with. It was great once, until this stupid Mash thing came along and they stopped fixing bugs in the 360 code stream. Oh well, I wonder what other Yahoo services Microsoft would have axed had the sale gone through.
We are creating the greatest SN ever envisioned and Yahoo BrickHouse should have. Perhaps when we go Beta they will “get it”. Everyone wonders where the “next big thing” will come from and what it will be. IF ONLY Yahoo knew.
Yahoo should have sold to google. They are ‘losing it’.
Not to worry. Yahoo! still has their chat rooms operational, which keeps dodgy journalist Chris Hansen of Dateline and online vigilante groups such as Perverted-Justice.com in business.
Yahoo! makes no business sense, when they keep a section (chat rooms) that is rife with vigilantes and spam-adbots, while ending more useful and entertaining sections.
Well I knew it was coming if they would have put as much money and time into fixing 360 and not trying to jump ship all the time they would have a great place to go..Hell alot of people are still dealing with the b.s. that 360 gives them because they don’t want to go no where I have been with yahoo.com since it opened along time ago and will still hang around with my mail acc. But really I think they have to many chiefs over there and not anuff indians, tons of brain power and no where to point it..
I say fix 360 get it running good add some stuff to it. win back your 360 family then work on something that you took time in planning for awhile before you move…I could just see a boss walking into the board meeting of planning and saying ( I have a great idea lets do this..) shit like that is going on over there..
Yahoo may have many talented Yahoo’s but they can’t cut it they need to bring in some one like myself and I’ll set them on a straight course in social networking.
They try to suck up to the so called top people that when they do try to Bring it,
it’s to little to late.Their resources my vision. We own Google in a year.
Some people have to much “talent” and they need to be cut loose.
The need to cater to the regular joes the next Micheal Arrington’s
they totally ignore that group and I went on mash months ago for
5 minutes.Wake up Yahoo it’s SHOWTIME.
Bad luck to Mash, maybe Yahoo has lost itself!
yahoo needs a facelift. they’re just copying what everyone else is doing with no real innovation and they’re about as sexy as a 1970’s porn star.
Dudes, I am right here. Fire those idiots and fork out USD 250k per quarter + stock options and I will show you how it should be done.