After a two-month pilot, Yahoo’s Mixd mobile
service has closed down. Mixd first
came to light in November last year. It was a group mobile messaging tool for the
youth market and had an experimental, trendy design. Currently the Mixd page has some
farewell text on it and a pointer to the much more conservative UI of Yahoo Mobile.
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.
When it comes down to it, Mixd was similar to Google’s Dodgeball, which is also a mobile social networking
product aimed at the youth market. While mobile is the medium of choice for many young
people, it seems that none of the big Internet companies has gotten a decent foothold in
that market yet. In our Oct 06 post
about Dodgeball, some commenters noted that the Dodgeball service was stagnant and not
going anywhere fast.
It may be that mobile social networking is a tough nut to crack, despite the very
lucrative demographics (youth market).
R/WW author Emre Sokullu also points out that Mixd was the first service to be born
from Yahoo, but announced as a separate brand – i.e. without the Yahoo prefix (Yahoo
Mail, Yahoo Pipes etc). There are other services like this, e.g. Flickr and Upcoming.org,
but they’ve been acquisitions rather than built in-house. So is this a sign that Yahoo’s
peanut butter manifesto is being enforced – i.e. Yahoo is cutting back on their product
portfolio? Or is it simply a case of Yahoo experimenting with new types of UIs separately
from the main brand, a la Google’s SearchMash, then
bringing them into the main product line when ready (in this case, Y! Mobile)?
