They have not abandoned social media however. Today, they’ve entered a new phase in socializing, which looks to turn Yahoo as a whole into a more social entity. The social team is being headed by Jim Stoneham, who only joined the Yahoo team six weeks ago according to TechCrunch.

Yahoo users get a new profile and the ability to create friendships with others, and different aspects of Yahoo will be integrated into the profiles. Stoneham discusses Yahoo’s new objective on the Yodel Anecdotal blog:

I want to make it clear that this new profile is not intended to be a new social destination on Yahoo!. Rather, our plan is to integrate “social” as a central dimension into the services you use every day. For example, if you’re on Yahoo! Messenger 9.0, you’re already seeing Yahoo! Buzz, Mybloglog, and Twitter updates as part of your friends’ status messages. Soon you’ll see social capabilities added elsewhere across Yahoo!, beginning with places where you start your day. The new homepage we’re testing will soon have an application that lets you stay up to date with what your friends are doing across the Web. And Yahoo! Mail will be delivering a smarter inbox, displaying emails from your most important connections first.

This appears to be a smart move on Yahoo’s part. There’s no question that the web as a whole is turning more social by the day, and this is a good way to keep users interested in using their services. Unfortunately, I still see this as more of a way to keep current users around than to pull them away from competitors. It will be interesting to see how this pans out for the company. The way it’s marketed could have a lot of bearing on how much new traffic Yahoo gets out of it.

Users can get started updating their Yahoo profiles by simply going to profiles.yahoo.com.

Thank you for trying out our Mash Beta service. We hope you had fun with it. Please note that we will shut down Mash on September 29, 2008. As a result, your current profile on Mash will no longer be available.

The only really surprising part about this move was hearing the name Yahoo! Mash brought up in the first place. It doesn’t often get the mention of your MySpaces and your Facebooks. Quite honestly, I had to think for a minute to even remember what it was. 

Perhaps a lack of press attention contributed to its demise. It probably didn’t help that membership was based on invite only. Maybe Yahoo! gave up too fast. It was only launched less than a year ago, and never even made it out of beta. On the other hand, maybe people just don’t need another generic social network.

Chris Snyder at Wired notes, "Aside from some customizable modules similar to Facebook apps and a cleaner design than MySpace, the only unique feature was that you could update your friends’ pages similar to a wiki."

There is a post on the Mash blog that features some frequently asked questions and answers with regards to the shut down, but there is not much insight into the exact reasons for it. The only information in the post concerns what will happen to user profiles and things of that nature.

You can tell how devastated users are over the demise of Yahoo! Mash when you see that the blog post about it has only 7 comments at this point. About three of them (debatably) mourn its loss.

It turned out that the Yahoo pulled the trigger a little too soon on the invitations. Both he and another Yahoo rep told Stone the invitation arrived prematurely.

“We are currently testing this alpha service internally with Yahoo employees, as we do with most of our services,” said the other unnamed Yahoo rep.

That doesn’t get us any closer to understanding what Yahoo Mash could be about. Stone offered a few suggestions related to social networking, Flickr, and a couple of tongue in cheek theories.

We’re inclined to think it’s related to music videos and mashups, possibly connected to an upcoming promotional hookup with a label and maybe a soft drink company for a contest. That would be in line with prior promotions Yahoo has done.