Yahoo Mash Closes. Some Things I Don’t Understand About Yahoo Handling Its Properties.

Now we hear the news that Yahoo Mash will be closed some time today. It has been announced by Yahoo! in an email all the users of the social network have received. In the email Yahoo! Team thanks everyone for participating in the beta test of the social network and invites to copy all the content we may want to keep to a separate document. I don’t have any content over there anyway and I don’t really think many users will be affected since Mash has not gained any traction even with the early adopters but still it’s disturbing they have only given the users one day to backup their information (for example, I don’t even check my Yahoo! Mail daily).

Now that Yahoo! Mash is closed the only social networking project they have is Yahoo! 360, a social network and a blogging platform that users actually seem to care about.

Mash was not your typical social network launched by a big name in the internet industry. Normally when we see such projects launched by big names in the industry we expect them to last for some time and at least get some following from loyal users. Unfortunately Yahoo! Mash with its idea of letting everyone edit each other profiles seemed to be scary to users and remained more of an experiment into social networking than a product anyone in the corporation actually cared about - hence the results.

But this post is not about Yahoo! Mash only actually. There is one thing that bothers me about how Yahoo! handles its properties not related to its main line of business. The thing is that I believe all of them lack integration into Yahoo! family so that potential users at least had some chance of discovering the services when browsing other popular Yahoo! properties (like search or email) while existing users could be exposed to some reminders not to forget about other services they already have accounts with. Unfortunately as it is right now the only thing they have done to combine all the services is making people use their Yahoo IDs to log in - otherwise integration is barely noticeable.

Take MyBlogLog or Flickr - both are successful and well-known brands (MyBlogLog in its niche, Flickr, I believe, we can call a household name already) and both seem to operate absolutely independently from other Yahoo properties. And Yahoo! does not seem to do anything to make sure the company on the whole benefits from having both acquired companies under its roof or help the services get extra visibility. Really, I don’t think adding “a Yahoo company” to the website is enough integration to help both Yahoo and the subsidiary. Same seems to be true for the widely-used Delicious or Upcoming as well.

What I think could work better is heavily promoting all the services Yahoo owns right there where it has traffic - on the Yahoo homepage. Right now there’s a small list of homemade services while the rest of them can be accessed by clicking the ‘More Yahoo! Services’ button only. What I have in mind is adding (and rotating them not to clutter the page further) blocks for featured photos with the most favorites during the day from Flickr, fastest growing blog communities from MyBlogLog, the most popular events from Upcoming and links from Delicious - anything that could send the visitors from the Yahoo! homepage to other Yahoo! properties instead of sticking to the age-old Yahoo search, mail, and news services only.

The only property of Yahoo that gets at least some decent handling from Yahoo is Yahoo! Buzz that has recently added support of all web publishers. At least here publishers have an incentive to try and build the popularity with the social voting service of Yahoo because we know there’s a chance of getting our stories visible on the Yahoo homepage - which invariably results in huge traffic (admittedly which a rare blog can actually survive).

Now let’s take a look at Yahoo! 360 - the only remaining social networking property for users to write blogs and share photos, recommendations, and music here. While I’ve had an account here for ages I have never bothered to actually create my page so I have decided today may be a good time to do just that. My idea was to see how well other services from Yahoo! are integrated into the social network since it obviously can be a very suitable platform for all types of integrations. Unfortunately my experience here does not show Yahoo! understands it.

First of all, you start creating your page by uploading up to 4 photos to use one of them as your default avatar. And it is actually uploading here - they don’t even offer me to link to some photos I already have on Flickr. The next thing I noticed was that I could share my photos on my page. And yes, I really could: I was given an option to link to either my Yahoo! Photos account (the service that was closed over a year ago!) or to my Flickr account. As a heavy Flickr user I linked 360 to my account with the photo sharing site and was told that for some reason I had no public photos at all. Last time I checked the vast majority of my photos were public and I only had a handful of photos for friends only. So sharing of photos did not even work.

I could also share my music here (from Yahoo! Music so that’s good) and join some public groups but for some reason there was no option to share my events from Upcoming or links from Delicious here - and that’s strange because both are an important part of our social activities. So the only option to give some place to these external services is to share them as feeds using the Share RSS feed functionality on a user’s page (which did not work for me, by the way).

And, finally, the blog. How can it be that all the blogs created on Yahoo! 360 do not immediately receive a community page on MyBlogLog along with the widget of last visitors? Honestly, MyBlogLog is easy to integrate so I fail to understand why this simple and quite obvious thing has not been done at all. And to me it is the final proof that Yahoo! does not really pursue any integrations with other properties it owns or acquires and this seems to be a strange decision. Yes, I know that services like Flickr, Delicious, or MyBlogLog are already very popular in their respective niches but does not it make sense to have them pushed to even more users? After all, Yahoo! reaches mainstream users with its major properties so why not try to bring some of these users to other less popular services as well? It is beyond my understanding why one would pay huge money for something and then avoid helping this something bring more money to one’s pockets.