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Yahoo recently announced on its official blog that it will close its Yahoo 360 social networking site on July 13, as the Web company originally planned to do in early 2008 and later postponed a few times. Users will have to migrate to the Yahoo Profiles service by that date to maintain their account information.

When Yahoo first announced its intentions to discontinue the product, it said the company was planning a transition to a unique Yahoo profile, a statement the company reiterated once more when it launched the ambitious Yahoo Open Strategy (YOS) project launched in April 2008. For this reason, it also closed its other social networking site Yahoo Mash in September 2008.

“It’s taking the user data and making it centrally available, and therefore available to the user all across the network,” Neal Sample, Yahoo’s chief platforms architect, said during an interview. “Part of our strategy is to normalize those profiles and collapse them into a single place and reduce user confusion. We’ll make a single dashboard for them to update their information, and we’ll go from looking like 25 different Yahoos with 25 different profiles to one Yahoo and one profile,” he declared.

Yahoo launched Yahoo Profiles — a project with the objective of finally building the promised unified Yahoo account — in October 2008. The service includes basic social networking functionality, allowing its users to write blog posts, create a friends list and update their status, similarly to what they would do on Facebook.

Yahoo Profiles, however, lacks many of the features of Yahoo 360, as Melissa Daniels, Yahoo’s community manager, who acknowledged this fact on the company’s official blog. “At this time, your new profile does not have all the features and functionality of your 360 profile. However, we are looking at incorporating new ways of expressing yourself through your profile,” she wrote. One of the most requested modifications was the ability for users to add multiple photos, which Daniels said the Yahoo team is currently looking into.

In an e-mail to its members, the company said: “We will be officially closing Yahoo 360 on July 13, 2009, to focus our efforts on making your new profile on Yahoo the place where you connect with the people who matter to you most. As a result, you will need to move your 360 information to your new profile before this date. After July 12, 2009, your content on Yahoo 360 will no longer be accessible.” Yahoo dropped customer support on this product already two years ago in an attempt to cut on maintainance costs.

According to ComScore Yahoo 360 had 13.9 million worldwide unique visitors in April, but only 982,000 of those were from the U.S, down from last year’s 1.8 million. Most of visits are coming from other countries and especially from Vietnam, where the site has become extremely popular.

“While we know that many of you have faithfully used this service over the past few years, our goal has been to find a way to unify your social experience and connections across all of Yahoo! and anywhere you travel across the Web. So, while we’re sad to say that we will no longer be supporting Yahoo! 360°, we’re excited about this larger plan and hope you’ll transition over and be a part of it, too,” the email further read.

The closure is also part of a larger plan that involves the reprioritization of some products within the company. Some of the other Yahoo products that have been discontinued since Bartz was nominated new Yahoo CEO include Geocities, Farechase and Briefcase.

Yahoo 360 plans to help its users migrate to Yahoo Profiles, particularly for Vietnamese users, where users will be able to transfer their contents to “Yahoo 360 Plus”, which was created ad hoc for that particular market.