On the heels of the announcement of Yahoo CEO Terry Semel’s 2006 bonus – 800,000 shares of stock worth $25.7 million in a year where shares of Yahoo dropped by some 35 percent – a smaller piece of news emerged. Yahoo has shuttered its youth mobile product, Mixd:

Mixd is going away, for now. The Mixd pilot study ended on February 25th, and the service will no longer be available. We’ve learned a lot from here, and you can expect to see more great mobile products from Yahoo! in the future. Thanks for your participation in Mixd. For more mobile, check out Yahoo! Mobile.

So long and thanks for all the user data, perhaps? Richard MacManus received some feedback from Yahoo about the end of Mixd:

Yahoo told Read/WriteWeb that from Mixd they "gained valuable insight about how youth communities socialize via mobile phones." Yahoo says they will incorporate group text messaging and multimedia sharing features into future Yahoo! mobile products.

The concept of group messaging seems to have some legs. Twitter has found a userbase, to the extent that its founder, Evan Williams, put his Odeo site up for sale to focus on Twitter instead. Yahoo has a much larger userbase, numbering in the millions. That advantage could be negated by Twitter’s simpler model when compared to Yahoo Mobile. Which in turn could make it an acquisition target in the way that the Delicious model found an audience and became purchase-bait. Delicious could be in the middle of another consolidation discussion, when compared to Yahoo My Web. Flickr versus Yahoo Photos has already been the subject of such speculation. Yahoo has a few duplicate services. If they’re going to keep the CEO, maybe it makes sense to do some trimming among the product lines. —

They plan on marketing their new site to college campuses. Senior director of Yahoo’s Advanced Products Group said,” It’s really an experiment. We’re putting it out to consumers to see how they use the product.”

Mixd just launched on Wednesday. On their site it says,” Mixd is about going out. Coordinate last-minute meetups, share pictures and videos from your phone, and remember last night on a website we create for you, automatically.” Yahoo expects users to form groups of friends and focus on a variety of social events. They have a reply-all feature, which allows a user to communicate to all of their friends in their network.

Each group will have a Web site, which will archive all photos, videos and text messages sent through the phones. There are several other sites that offer similar services such as Dodgeball, Zemble and Twitter.

Yahoo has probably launched this site now in hopes of attracting advertisers. The site caters to the 18 to 26 year old demographic which advertisers want to reach. Currently Yahoo does not have a business model for the site. Gatz said, “It’s really about testing, and gathering user feedback.”

Yahoo seems to be taking a wait and see attitude towards their new site. They admittedly call it an experiment. An experiment that may not be that original but could possibly pay off.

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Mike is a staff writer for WebProNews. Visit WebProNews for the latest ebusiness news.