While Bebo replaces Google as the UK's most viewed website and Facebook's staggering growth continues, Yahoo! has launched a new social networking project called Yahoo! Mash.The beta version of the site kicked off with an invitation-only preview last Friday and signifies a fresh start to Yahoo!'s social networking ambitions. Yahoo!'s previous attempts in this area, through its personal communication portal Yahoo! 360°, did not meet with success and Yahoo! also missed out on acquiring Facebook.
While Yahoo! 360° failed to take off due to its static and utilitarian nature, Yahoo! Mash combines popular features from a variety of successful Web 2.0 sites, such as Facebook (a library of modules can be added), MySpace (users can use their own backgrounds and colour schemes can be customised) and Wikipedia (friends can edit each other's pages).
Will Aldrich, heading up the team behind Y! Mash, announced on his online blog that Mash takes a new approach to online profiles. Users can draw a distinction between friends and best friends, starter profiles for friends can be created and profiles can generally be left open to contributions by trusted friends. These features can be restricted by applying privacy boundary settings and the site gives users the option to undo each change made to their profile.
Moreover, a new set of expressions is introduced to announce emails ("woot") or turn off colour and background settings ("this is fugly"). Currently all modules are provided by Yahoo! but Mash is expected to allow external developers to create applications soon, in a similar fashion to Facebook. An interesting module already integrated is MyMashLog, which collects names of users who have visited a page. However, Yahoo! Mash is still to integrate the company's various other properties and there is currently neither a search option (only regular Yahoo! search) nor a mobile version of the site.
However, with the popularity of so many social networks flourishing, users who maintain a number of profiles may be seen to suffer from "social networking fatigue". The Google-sponsored SocialStream project aims to combat this mental exhaustion, through interconnecting existing networks to provide a user centric (as opposed to network centric) perspective. Resultantly, it seems more than apparent that Yahoo! Mash is entering a tough market.
On this note, Yahoo! Mash's claim to offer a new generation of online profiles seems to be a bold statement. However, the site receives remarkably positive reviews from a wide spectrum of social network savvy critics, thus giving us reason to believe that it could be a runaway success.
