What sets Mash apart
What is strange about Mash is precisely what sets it apart from Facebook and MySpace. Where MySpace yields to the individual, giving you perhaps too much freedom to design the page, and Facebook takes a strong communal stance, allowing your network to define the space, Yahoo takes a different turn. Mash seems to be working hard to manage the experience for its users. Rather than arming users with new tools daily like Facebook, or feeding members community-driven content only when there's a critical mass of users interested in such generic media samplings as music or comedy, Mash takes a little from column A and a little from column B.
It's hard to say if the decision to split the difference between MySpace and Facebook was wise. Few can argue with Mash's functionality, but its style may be a little too schizophrenic to succeed. If Mash is going to be the next Facebook or MySpace, it would do well to cool the heels of a design team that is perhaps a little too passionate. They've done a great job, but they fall down by assuming that their ideal social network is your ideal social network, and Yahoo runs the risk of building out too much of the Mash world before they decide to populate it, rather than letting the early users set the tone.
That being said, Yahoo isn't done building Mash by any stretch. Although the company remains tight-lipped about the site, it is clear that it is more than open to suggestions, calling out for feedback, which is a big step for a 1.0 giant in a 2.0 world.
"Ongoing product innovation is important to Yahoo, and we continue to test various products and services to gain feedback from our users," a company spokesman said when I got my invite. "Mash, an experimental profile service, is an example of this ongoing testing."
The invite also read: "It's good to be loved."
So maybe social networks are beginning to shape up like the real world. Perhaps MySpace represents the big, bad vastness of the world. Maybe Facebook is your digital classroom and LinkedIn is your office. If that's true, I guess Mash wants to be your nest. That metaphor almost makes sense when you consider that most internet users still call Yahoo home, despite the fact that Google gets much of the press as an internet leader. The trouble is that Yahoo's lead in the homepage game is just as significant as its lag in the social networking race. Mash may be designed as a place to start your internet social life, but its late arrival means many of us have already moved out of the nest.
Could Mash be the ultimate ad platform?
For all the potential drawbacks of Mash, it still might be the best numbers play in the social networking space (eventually). Here's why: Mash was built with ads in mind from day one. That means Yahoo has the potential to deliver a social network where advertisers meet users on an equal footing. That's no small detail. Facebook has had some hiccups introducing ads to its users, many of whom expressed shock that founder Mark Zuckerberg would dare monetize their beloved site. Over at MySpace, the challenge is a little bit different, with executives working hard to figure out how to deliver TV-sized numbers to advertisers salivating at the site of the world's largest social network.
Mash also has some pretty ad-friendly features already built into the space. Theoretically, any brand could use a tool like the Amazon Wishlist module, which fuses ecommerce with brand advocacy. While any social network could arm its users with such a tool, only Mash has attempted to culture users from day one to talk to each other about what products they love. And with a Facebook-style news feed dubbed MyMashLog, each update is disseminated to the users' friends automatically. So, for example, if I were to add a Samsung LCD HDTV to my Amazon Wishlist, each of my friends would know about it instantly.
But there's the rub. I only have two friends on Mash right now. I'll get more when the site opens to the public, but will my friend numbers equal those that I have on MySpace and Facebook?
If Yahoo can scale Mash (and that's a huge if), it won't have to confront Facebook's problems, and it may be better positioned to solve the riddle facing MySpace because, to be blunt, MySpace just isn't a great website. But Mash will only succeed if Yahoo uses its late start to its advantage, sidestepping the mistakes made by its competitors and applying and improving on the hard-won lessons of the early social networks.
Michael Estrin is associate editor at iMediaConnection. Read full bio.