Yahoo Mash shutting down (or how to shut down a web application the bad way)

I’m not a Mash user, but I found this story interesting. As you can read on TechCrunch, Yahoo Mash, a social networking site, will be shutting down in a month from now. As always it is not a nice thing for a user, but sometimes it happens. And here’s what makes it very interesting from the usability perspective. 

If you carefully read the email posted on TechCrunch site, then you may notice it says you need to copy your data manually as in a month it become completely unavailable. Wait a second. Manually? Manually is so last century. It is so Web 1.0. Don’t they have a way to export all user data into an XML file, or all the contacts as vcards? Or maybe a nice PDF presentation with all the data on it? It is not that hard to create such a functionality, and from a user perspective, in this not very pleasant conditions, it is at least a nice way to say them “thank you” for using the service.

Looks like somebody at Yahoo didn’t do a homework.