Yahoo! seems to’ve given up totally on social networking as a viable business. They’d already been ignoring Yahoo! 360 for a while. Then they launched Yahoo! Mash, their beta attempt at a social network. Doesn’t seem to have worked either (obviously, because I’m only one in my circle I know who’s on Mash, apart from Lord Vader that is), because I got an email from them today:

Dear Yahoo! Mash member,

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. We strongly recommend that you return to http://mash.yahoo.com and copy the content that you wish to save onto a separate document.

For a list of FAQs, please refer to the Mash Help Page.

Thanks for trying out Mash!

Matt Warburton
Yahoo! Community Manager

In a way, it does make sense. Yahoo! is concetrating more on developing platforms than services itself. It’s a member of the OpenSocial Foundation, and since it’s anyway too late for the Yahoo! - or even Google - to enter the social networking game they find it easier to create platforms which everybody else uses, like OpenSocial.

photo credit: Duet G.Being the largest email address provider in the world has its own problems, like it is for Yahoo!. With more than 250 million users (and growing) compared to a puny few tens of millions with Gmail, this huge number of users also means that many people don’t get the email ID of their dreams. To remedy this, Yahoo! is now giving out @ymail.com and @rocketmail.com addresses! The announcement was made a while ago on the Yodel Anecdotal Blog. Get them at new.mail.yahoo.com/addresses. Rocketmail, of course, one of the first email service providers which later got bought out by Yahoo!, so THAT’s a really vintage email ID you could show off. Ymail.com is short and snappy too.

The only problem I see now is what if someone has a yahoo.com ID, and someone else signs up for a ymail.com ID of the same name. Till now, the country where your mail ID was hosted was immaterial, but with the new system might come a bit of confusion initially. Say, while adding people on Yahoo! Instant Messenger. Like, are we supposed to add the extension too now, while adding messenger IDs? Of course, it must be set to accept yahoo.com as default…

Also, if you currently sign-up for a ymail.com ID, and then try to use the ‘extra email address’ feature to add a supplementary sign-in ID right now, it only checks for yahoo.com IDs, not ymail.com. That, would probably be sorted out in the next few days.

On the whole, this is a terrific news! No more multitudes of underscores and weird numbers and birthdates needed to land the email ID of your choice - opens up the playing field for newcomers to the Internet. Yahoo!

Long before I’d shifted to my own hosting - or even had my own domain name, I needed a file storage service to distribute any files I had. And at that time, I’d chosen Streamload, which had later shifted its customers to its parallel service called MediaMax. Now, out of nowhere, they’ve decided to pull the plug on their users, and shift it to a paid service. It’s simple - pay ~$6 per month, or say goodbye to your files. THIS is pure extortion, and cheating customers in its ugliest form. I doesn’t hurt me, simply because all my files are now safely on my own hosting. But what about users who’re not so lucky, and had trusted a company with their online backups?

This is SICK. When people shut shop, they let their users make a move. When Yahoo! Photos closed down, they gave the choice to their users to move to other services, like Yahoo!’s own Flickr - and even their competitors like Snapfish and Photobucket. The very least MediaMax could have done was to offer to shift to Box.net or something. They didn’t. And I really think their reputation will suffer because of this, as new users will be apprehensive about trusting a site which does NOT think about its customers before making a move.

Must read article for people interested in open source software. Tech firm Coverity has been doing a review of around 250 different open source software for the US Department of Homeland Security, and this is what their report finds at the end of their testing period. Read the full story on Coverity’s open source software review on Yahoo! News.