Yahoo! Mash

» see mash.yahoo.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

I missed yahoo mash. wrong region, wrong era, wrong audience. it launched as an invite-only beta in september 2007, ran for about a year, and was shut down on september 28, 2008. yahoo's announcement landed quietly because by late 2008 the conversation was already about whether facebook had won the platform war. mash was yahoo's fourth straight failed attempt at social networking after 360, an acquisition bid for facebook itself, and an acquisition bid for bebo that microsoft beat them to.

the design idea behind mash was actually interesting. every profile was a stack of modules: a photo block, a friend block, a comment block, a music block, whatever you wanted to drop on the page. and unless you explicitly disabled it, your friends could edit your modules. someone else could add a stupid photo to your profile, write a fake quote, change your bio. it was a deliberate web-2.0 idea: the profile is a shared object rather than a personal one. it was also a feature that needed a critical mass of friends to be funny instead of just confusing.

mash never got that mass. invites were rationed for months, the public launch never really arrived, and by mid-2008 yahoo was a company being dragged through a hostile microsoft takeover attempt and had no spare attention for an experimental social product. on august 28, 2008 yahoo announced the shutdown. on september 28 the modules vanished.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the gimmick ~

the friend-edits-your-profile feature was the part the press wrote about. in retrospect it anticipated a couple of small later moments: the brief facebook "poke your friend's wall" culture, the wikipedia-style editable bio pages on niche sites, the entire "anyone can edit my page" web-2.0 register. but it never had room to mature on mash because the platform itself was gated and small.

the other thing mash did was let users build their profile from drag-and-drop modules, which sat in the same window of design history as netvibes, pageflakes, and igoogle. that whole modular-web idea died with the apps it lived inside. mash was one of the deaths.

~ the funny part ~

yahoo had now lost at social networking four times in a row. 360 had stalled before facebook went public, the facebook acquisition collapsed in 2006 over the share price, the bebo acquisition went to aol in 2008, and now mash had failed too. techcrunch wrote up the closure with the exact line "0-4 on social networking." it became one of the small jokes about yahoo's mid-2000s strategic drift. the company would try a few more times under different banners through the early 2010s and never crack it.

none of this reached me in real time. by 2008 i was on facebook like the rest of the people i knew in turkey, msn was still open in the background, and yahoo's social experiments were the kind of thing you read about in a techcrunch summary if you read about them at all.

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