Yahoo Unveils Mash Social Network... Sort of

Available by Invitation Only

[amznVibe]

But what is it?
[bits.blogs.nytimes.com...]

Probably (yet another) social network or perhaps a way to group-up yahoo services on one page?

[Eric]

I heard the people said it's a social network

[martinibuster]

More information released today from the NYTimes [bits.blogs.nytimes.com].

The site, which began an invitation only preview Friday, is quite an homage to Facebook, but it adds one significant new wrinkle: users can edit each other’s profiles, redecorating, changing information, and adding features. Think the Wikipedia version of a social network.

Sounds interesting but I wonder if it would have been better to give it it's own domain instead of a subdomain of Yahoo.

There's also a Yahoo blog for Mash [blog.mash.yahoo.com], too.

[engine]

Yahoo Inc is testing an experimental social network service called Mash that makes it easy for Yahoo users to share tidbits of their lives with friends and family online, the company said on Sunday.

Mash, to which a limited number of public users began being invited as testers on Friday, was described by a spokeswoman as a new, next-generation service that is independent from the company's 2-½ year-old Yahoo 360 degree profile service.

Yahoo to start testing Mash, a social network site [uk.reuters.com]

[jeffgroovy]

I can't imagine a more annoying situation then to wake up and find my profile altered by some one who thought it would be a little better this way or that way, hopefully you get the option to approve or disapprove changes made to your profile before they go live(unlike wikipedia where changes are live BEFORE another human reviews them) or that would be a complete nightmare in the making....hmmm..."Now let's see, where's President Bush's official personal profile on Mash?"

[jpack]

For the wiki-like stuff -- only your friends can change your profile, and not all of the elements on the page can be changed by them.

The content does change automatically (no need to approve it) but you get an email notification of the change and also you can reject the change through a simple revision history page.

I think that's actually one of the most innovative parts of mash, and I also like that it encourages you to really only add friends who are actually friends (or at least people you trust enough not to vandalize your page... err.. in a malicious way) rather than the myspace "I have 10 million friends" concept.

[jeffgroovy]

jpack, thanks for the clarification. I have to agree that's kind of a cool idea if you're select group of friends can change certain attributes. That could make for some fun practical jokes like changing your friends version of a story you were involved in to your perspective instead of theirs. Hopefully they give the option to control which attributes can be changed as well.

[garyr_h]

So this won't be that great for businesses due to the wiki-infrastructure. It isn't good for meeting new people, thus many young people won't use it. And of course, it is run by Yahoo... which is good or bad depending on your perception.

Yeah.... I can see this going far...