Yahoo is shutting down its little-used social-networking service, Yahoo Mash, after only a year in business, CNET News reports. Yahoo community manager Matt Warburton sent an e-mail to Mashers that read, "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."

As the report said, Yahoo Mash didn't really offer much new. The chief difference was that instead of inviting friends to join, you created profiles for friends, and then invited them to come and fix them. That's not really how they had phrased it, but that's the essence of what Yahoo Mash offered.

Yahoo spent the last few years introducing a dizzying array of community-based services like Mash, 360, My Yahoo, and more. Many were technically adept and well designed, but numerous services were redundant with each other, and it seemed like the company wasn't sure if it was competing with itself or what businesses it wanted to be in. (Hence that whole "Microsoft takeover bid" thing.)