Weekendr was a social network launched in October 2006 where the users organised weekend activities and shared them with other members. The principal objective was to make new friends. Another of its features was to inform you about what your friends were going to do during the weekend and to allow you to sign up to their plans.

It boasted all the typical social networking functions, personal blogs and it allowed you to customise its appearance. In the first week of its launch, 300 users registered thanks to the interest it aroused on a number of blogs, amongst them Mashable.

It was released by a German company but the site was available only in English; surely a preliminary step towards a greater internationalisation that never came to be.

The creator of Weekendr is a German 39 years old; a CEO of a company that develops games for mobiles and casual games for PC. His name is Andreas Schneider and he lives very close to Cologne (Germany). He developed and designed the social network in just a month using Microsoft ASP (Active Server Pages).

Mygazines.com was a social network that was launched in June this year and lasted only 5 months online. Yesterday its closure was announced.

Mygazines allowed users to share online their favourite publications (especially magazines). In addition, they were rewarded with a part of the benefits of the advertising displayed on the site. It had the typical social features of a network and used a special browser that didn’t allow the downloading of magazines.

In their servers, they hosted all type of publications, with the Creative Commons licence (when they were originals provided by users) and those with copyright. They had several complete issues of lots of magazines such as MacWorld, Business Week, Forbes, etc.

As you can imagine, the success was absolute -online magazines for free! That was precisely the reason of its closure, the violation of magazines’s copyright.

Publishers soon came down on them, pressing them for the immediate closure. Mygazines advertisers quit contracting advertising and the first serious legal actions arrived.

From the user’s point of view, the idea was great, but this was a project doomed to failure. A distribution agreement with publishers might be a good business model, although maybe not profitable, at least legal.

Yahoo! Mash was another social network by Yahoo!, launched in September of 2007. After a failed attempt to purchase Facebook, they decided to create a new social network.

Mash wanted to be Myspace, My Yahoo! and Facebook all together. They had even planned to publish an application platform like the latter.

As distinguishing elements they had the wiki mode, by which every contact from your network was able to edit pages or add modules. As elements inspired in Myspace, they offered the possibility of customizing pages to an extent that they could damage our pupils. I recommend you the analysis that Antonio Ortiz made then.

Two days ago, its closure was announced. They don’t explain the reason, but we can imagine it. These words by Mariano Amartino may serve as reflection:

“If it was that simple to make a community grow, Google would have never bought YouTube, Yahoo! would have never bought MyBlogLog and some media would be already the owners of the whole traffic of the countries where they have influence.”

Yahoo! still has Yahoo! 360. What I don’t know is how long it will take until we speak about it here.