About 10 days or so ago, Yahoo released (invite only at the moment) Yahoo Mash, their latest social networking experiment. I managed to get myself an invite a few days ago, and from what I can see so far, it is something like a myspace meets facebook meets orkut meets wikipedia (yes I said wikipedia, I’ll explain more in a bit), trying to encompass the best of these social networking sites, and at the same time trying to offer something unique (lets face it, you need to stand out to get noticed).
At the moment, someone needs to invite you into Yahoo mash, by creating a profile for you. This page looks very plain, very boxy something like so
Braking the page down, you have the following sections (you can have a look at my Mash Profile):
- They allow you a lot of control on how you edit your profile, by adding CSS you can make it look exactly like you want (a la Myspace).
- You can add ‘Modules’ (a la Facebook apps)
- You have a lot of other features, like an area called ‘My Space’ which basically is an html area where you can embed videos, pics etc.
- There is a guestbook area, which is like your Facebook wall or your Myspace comments area.
- ‘Blurt’ for the micro bloggers, Twitter/ ‘Facebook Updates’ lovers.
- The usual About Me, Friends, Name, Profile Pic etc.
This is where they get different, they allow users to edit each others profile by allowing them to change the look, edit facts and add Tags!
The settings are naturally editable to prevent malicious users completely trashing someone elses profile and revisions are saved as well to allow users to rollback changes they do not like (which is where the comparison to wikipedia comes in).
After the disappointment of Yahoo 360, do I think this new attempt by Yahoo will be successful?
I can’t really see any reason why it should not. It all depends on how they promote this, how successful the hype generated by them is and how they respond to user feedback during the public testing phase.
They have done the right things so far, taking the best features from the best and adding some new twists to keep things fresh. There are still a few issues they need to work out (you cannot search for friends for example!), but the site is still in beta mode and there has only been about a week of public testing so there will probably be a few more issues that will get unearthed, but in the mean time if you want to have a look at Yahoo Mash, you can get invites from Inviteshare, (or if you ask really nicely, I might be tempted to help you out as well :P)
