Does Yahoo!'s new social network smack of desperation, or is it the stuff of inspiration? Get a sneak peek at Mash, Yahoo's answer to MySpace and Facebook.
Welcome to selling ad space in a Web 2.0 world, where users continue to migrate to platforms that let them hook up with each other and drift away from static publications.
That might have been the writing on the virtual wall that ushered Terry Semel out of the top slot at Yahoo! and brought back founder Jerry Yang. While the internet giant's social networking struggles predated the recent management shakeup, Yahoo is now officially in the MySpace-race.
But when your competitor is a household name, a leading web destination and does double duty as both a noun and a verb ("I don't need your number, I'll MySpace you), where do you even begin?
If you're Yahoo and you want to start a social network, you'll need to balance two sometimes competing interests: the utility for the user and the effectiveness for the advertiser. In a nutshell, you have a choice. Go big like MySpace, Facebook and Orkut (their international numbers are quietly going through the roof). Or, you can find a niche and dig deep like Ning, which is Netscape founder Marc Andreessen's call to build your own social network.
Either way, if you want to monetize the site, you'll have to deliver a broad audience or a highly desirable niche segment. Yahoo, which looks to be scrapping its failed Yahoo 360 social network, is betting on big numbers with its Mash social network.
Although Mash remains in beta -- open only to Yahoo employees and media types -- enough of the site is built to determine if it's a real threat to the likes of MySpace and Facebook.
The answer, like so many things in life, depends on who you ask. The U.K.'s Inquirer called Mash "desperation on the cusp of madness" and a "sure sign that online social networking is spinning into insanity." The newspaper was referring to the right (perhaps even responsibility) of Mash users to edit their friend's pages.
So, did Yang return to guide Yahoo through its most recent rough patch minus his sanity?
Hardly.
First, it should be noted that Mash isn't yet operational, which means it's a little like the Death Star in "Return of the Jedi." Mash has the potential to be a game-changer for Yahoo, but right now there's nothing to stop the rebels in the form of fickle users from blowing it to smithereens by ignoring the site just as they ignored Yahoo 360. Unlike the Death Star, however, Mash is largely uninhabited, which means it's hard to ascertain its value as a social network. Exploring Mash is a little like walking through a digital ghost town. I can see places I'd want to hang out and activities I'd like to try, but because it's only in beta, I just have to pretend.
Has the whole world gone crazy?
Naturally, the first thing I did was put the insanity claim to the test by tinkering with one of my boss' pages. Because I thought he had missed the boat, I decided to add the News Ticker module to Brad Berens' profile. The ticker mimics the ubiquitous cable TV news crawl, complete with sponsorship opportunities. It also allows the user to select news that is relevant by subscribing to an RSS feed.
Later, I added the Karl Marx Paddleball module to Brad's page. It's hard to see what the ad play is with that application. But if time spent on site is an important metric by which to judge a social network, the ability to bounce a red rubber ball off the father of Communism's head did have a strange appeal. But maybe that's because I'm old enough to remember a time when anything with Karl Marx on it was somehow risqué.
And that brings me to an observation from Scott Karp from DigitalMediaWire. His main gripe: Mash is yet another social network that assumes he's a teenager.
While I agree with Karp that Mash has a child-like appeal, I can't say that it's a uniform one. The appearance of Karl Marx isn't an aberration that keeps the over-30 crowd engaged. There are other relics from a bygone age that can easily be "grabbed." A module for Asteroids (the classic video game) lets users literally play on the page. And Yahoo's local play, dubbed Wheel of Lunch, smacks of nostalgia, although it is a cool way to incorporate local search by letting users spin a wheel that randomly selects a nearby restaurant.