Yahoo India shuts down Spotm, social network that was never launched!

August 31, 2009

By sinha

Yet another blow to Yahoo’s social networking initiative – Yahoo India‘s Spotm (which was launched exactly a year back) will go off the web by September 1st! (as we speculated earlier)

This was damn quick, considering that the product was in private beta ever since the launch and was never promoted (even within the Yahoo network).

This is what the official page reads as:

“Dear SpotM User,
SpotM was a communications product that we were experimenting within India. As of September 1, 2009, we will be closing the site and it will no longer be accessible. We sincerely thank you for your participation and your valuable feedback. -The SpotM Team”

All we know is that the product won’t be missed.

But this does raises questions on Yahoo’s ability to build a social play (after all, it’s not a search player anymore).

What’s your opinion?

Tags: india online, social networks in india, spotm

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Nisha on September 1, 2009 at 2:39 pm

Ashish, Is it any wonder that over 50% of Indian Internet users can be found on social networking and photo & video sharing sites ?? Chk it out http://bit.ly/H8KxY

Aayush Puri on September 1, 2009 at 5:16 pm

Well atleast nowYahoo! is not lingering along with sick (economically) products, which is something that has plagued the company for a long time. Engineering excellence is fine and so are cool products…but if you are unable to compete or there isn’t enough market for growth then better realize it early and move on to something else.

Sridhar (open2save.com) on September 1, 2009 at 5:56 pm

I would argue Yahoo should turn it’s email, groups and other content users into it’s social networking play. If cnn and nytimes can add facebook connect and turn on social networking effect … why can’t Yahoo add social networking as a feature to it’s existing user base?

One can even make the argument that social networking in the long term will just be a feature for every internet business … like blogs, chat, ratings and comments (which were once stand alone markets like s.networking)