They say that things go wrong because people build walls instead of brigdes. Still, what happens when there are too many bridges to choose from? Recently, Yahoo has learned the answer to this question. And it did so the hard way.

With a “Yahoo 360” striving to keep afloat and a failed attempt to purchase Facebook - which, truth be told, would have been quite a feather in its cap - Yahoo has recently announced that, on September 29, it will be shutting down Yahoo Mash, a tool designed for social networking.

Having MySpace and Facebook as competitors in the field, Yahoo couldn’t get around to figuring out a way to offer users original features, the only thing that could help one make their mark in a saturated market.

MySpace and Facebook pride in the advantage of having initially offered people unprecedented incentives to sign-up: the opportunity for bands to make their music known to the public and the fact that it first very much resembled a college directory, respectively.

Launched in September 2007, Yahoo Mash was a private beta-and has remained a private beta to this very day-whose most notable feature was that, instead of creating your own profile, you could create profiles for your friends and afterwards invite them to adopt, customize or update them to their liking. Unfortunately, many found this a bit too intrusive for their taste.

This failure is the second major one for Yahoo where social networking is concerned. In 2007, the company had to shut down “Mixd”, a social networking site which only lived to be a few months old.