Review on Yahoo! Mash - a new Social Networking site

September 16, 2007

Yahoo! has launched it’s new social networking site called Yahoo! Mash. This is currently in private beta and requires invitation to join. This is the day 3 and I have been just exploring it for the last 2 days. Glad to have got the invite on Day 1.

Yahoo! had earlier started their social networking site Yahoo! 360 and after which there have been strong competition with several other social networking sites which gets really tough since users would not be joining all the social networking unless they find some really value added and something new. Recently after Yahoo! failed to acquire Facebook - the second largest social networking (1st being MySpace) site to Microsoft, and to have it launched before Google launches it’s Social Stream project.

Y! Mash so called as the next generation social networking site looks like a combination of MySpace, Facebook, My Yahoo!, and Yahoo! 360. You have the widget concept as you do in Facebook and can also edit your friend’s profile in case they have left the option open for you to edit being semi-wiki concept.

Once you get the invite and accept it, you re first asked if you are fine with the profile that your friend has created for you. You may create your all new profile if you feel. There are 3 options: “Yes’ I’ll keep it”,”Create New”, “Delete this Page”. By deleting the page, If you select “Delete this page”, you can either select “Delete”, “Cancel” or “Delete and Opt-Out”. If you select “Delete”, you will delete the profile created for you. If you select “Delete and Opt-Out”, Mash will never be able to send email invites to that email address again.

It has a “What others are doing” section which gives you the brief details on what your friends are doing with their profile, what have they changed, tagged, removed etc… and similarly with your profile. The “Pulse” section gives you a detailed description. This is the same as you view in Facebook under the “News Feed” section and “Updates from your friends” on Orkut. To be frank, FaceBook has a neat way to display it. May be we will also have to explore it with Y! Mash if we can rearrange them.

Under the settings section you can manage your preferences on Who can see your profile?, Who can edit your profile?, Who can post on your guest book?, manage notifications, Emails, managing users / blocking, etc… There is another setting called Simple URL. When you get your profile, you get an ugly URL to your profile using the profile ID like http://mash.yahoo.com/profile.php?id=KVrJLu5j2yVViv5f3O2K. Using the Simple URL, I have now activated it as http://mash.yahoo.com/ashwinkini. Simple to remember now isn’t it?

There is a Shout box called as “blurt” where you can add announcements to your Profile page and a “guest book” where you can post a message. The guest book is just as a Scrapbook on Orkut and The Wall on FaceBook.

The My Stuff section is a good handy module that allows you to interact with your friends, paste HTML snippets, that may be a YouTube Video, Flash Games, Flickr Photos, or any other interative content you may want to share.

You can customize your Mash profile with some basic HTML editing through the Module Gallery and can also Style your profile with the excellent new feature to edit CSS. You can have your creativity displayed with the CSS editing - no HTML needed. The CSS feature was originally started by MySpace which now even Yahoo! has adopted. This will surely keep it an edge above other social networking sites.

Now here’s an interesting thing that is introduced. You have a pet born along with your profile called Mash Pet. This comes by default when you claim your profile. You can treat your pet in the following ways: feed, pet, mash, snorgle, lick, smack, poke, zap, kill, hunger. You have to treat it like your real pet so that it won’t die. Nice way to have you visit your profile alive too.. as if you don’t frequently visit your profile, your pet may die. So keep it alive, keep visiting your profile and treat your pet. This is also a nice way to express your mood to your friends visiting your profile.

Here’s my say to Y! mash: Good way to start all new instead of improvising on the Yahoo! 360. The question now being that after a lot of users getting addicted or used to Facebook and Orkut, would the world now go Mashing? Atleast not so soon for me. Let’s find out as we use it. If you need an invite to Y! Mash, please leave you e-mail id in the comment section and I will send it across to you.

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