A little more than two months after we first reported rumors about Yahoo’s new social network Mosh, the company has given us a preview of a social network with a slightly different name: Mash.
The service includes features common to Facebook, MySpace, and My Yahoo. You can load a set of modules onto your profile page and move them around drag-and-drop style. The modules include Flickr RSS, Ego Boost, Common Friends, MyMoshLog2, Blog Module (RSS 2.0), Asteroids, Astrology, PimpMyPet, Hover, Kaleidescope, Guestbook, and My Stuff.
The modules gallery also states that “in the coming months we’re going to open up our module development platform to 3rd party developers,” which suggests that Mash will be following in Facebook’s footsteps at least to some extent (it will be interesting to see whether there will be canvas-like pages, too).
Users are encouraged to edit each other’s pages. Each time we visit our profile page, we are seeing new modules that others have loaded for us. This capability certainly adds to the “mashing” aspect of the social network. It is also appears as though Yahoo intends for users to mash their information together from across the company’s various properties, perhaps making Mash the main hub for Yahoo users.
While profile pages appear to have a pretty consistent structural layout (like Facebook), users can customize the design of their pages by changing colors and inserting background images (like MySpace).
Mash also has something called Pulse, which is very similar to Facebook’s news feed. The Pulse page shows “updates from your friends” that are basically Twitter-like messages reporting all of your friends’ activity on Mash.
Unfortunately, it looks like Mash lacks a vital feature of Facebook: search. In the top right of every Mash page there is a search box for regular Yahoo search, but that appears to be it.
Yahoo is calling Mash the next generation of profiles and has plans to roll it out quietly. Mash users can invite their friends into the network, so we’ll be getting a section for Mash up on InviteShare shortly (Update: We have set up an InviteShare page for Mash here). When you invite a friend into Mash, you can create a profile for them that they can choose to adopt or not.
Mash appears to be Yahoo!’s way of saying adieu to its existing social network, Yahoo! 360, but no word yet on whether the company will actually be shutting down 360.
Mash’s blog can be found here.
Additional screen shots:
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(Dislaimer: I work on Mash, but don’t speak for it officially)
“On first blush, Mash looks like a cross between Facebook, MySpace, and Netvibes/Pageflakes/My Yahoo!” — it also has a bit of Wiki DNA: anyone you grant permissions to can edit your profile or add modules they think are relevant to your profile. “Mash”-ups are a big inspiration here.
Might actually be interesting, I’ll give it a shot probably. Although I already use these so little, MySpace is more just an address book / email whitelist service anymore.
I like the idea of being able to edit others profiles — seems almost like turning the whole profile into a super “wall” or “comment board” — just hope there is privacy/controls in place so people can’t erase all my hard work or put words into my ‘mouth’.
@Hmm
Indeed there are privacy controls
Who can see your profile?
* Only you
* Some of my Friends
o Best Friends
o Family
* All Friends
* Anyone
Who can edit your profile?
* Only you
* Some of my Friends
o Best Friends
o Family
* All Friends
* Anyone
Who can post on your guestbook?
* Only you
* Some of my Friends
o Best Friends
o Family
* All Friends
* Anyone
Also if you click the “revision history” link on your profile, you can reject any edit that anyone makes to your profile.
clueless….absolutely clueless
Can someone please send me an invite to Mash? It’s invite only! My email address is oteromark@yahoo.com. Greatly appreciated. Thanks!
Another yahoo product with no spark, no joy.
Actually, I just got in and its way more awesome than I thought it was going to be.
FSB= Spam… shut it down Michael
So it’s in iGoogle page pulling all my relevant feeds with my picture slapped on top? Yahoo!’s truly innovating. The “friends” are no doubt from Yahoo! Messenger.
Truly awesome step from Yahoo!, the only dilemma I have is whether I should express myself to my friends with Yahoo! 360 or yet another bleak self-portal from Yahoo!
Mike’s yahoo mash picture looks scarier than bozo the clown. He looks like he wants to kill someone or threat someone.
I hope he doesn’t take picture himself with butcher knife
Can some one please send me an invite – very much appriciated: marc@webvogel.de – Thanks
Interesting, very Interesting. Finally 360 is going to be replaced by something better. Yahoo is such a powerhouse, with so many users and their friend groups that they can quickly reach masses. Of late they have been little vary with respect to number of products, competing with each other. Hope this is part of consolidation/improvements, they have been trying for. Good Luck to all the Yahooooos!!
Feels too Yahooish, and that’s the problem.
I have not played with it yet but based on the information we have, it seems that they are merely playing catch up with Facebook, at least for now. I have no doubt that there is great and promising technology behind all this, but I would like them to articulate what makes them different and better, otherwise there is no point in leaving the leader of the pack. And nobody really wants to manage multiple identities, at least once the novelty has worn off, unless they are used for radically different purposes (e.g. family and friends vs. business vs. hobby). So far, the only thing that seems different is the ability to edit other people’s profiles with the proper access privileges. Use cases, please? I would think most people would rather be in full charge of their own image, unless they’re dead maybe (e.g. genealogically-oriented social network Ă la Geni). My 2 cents based on the information I have…
Geez – Nokia has already launched a mobile social networking site called MOSH.
http://mosh.nokia.com/
Yahoo has a lot of resources available to them.. Couldn’t they pay a research company to come up with a better name than “Mash”??
Heard the buzz about Mash and would love an ivite to try it out.
Currently, I enjoy Yahoo’s 360…….Thanks
re Inviteshare – is anyone else surprised to see that they expose in clear text the email addresses of everyone on the waiting list to get an invitation??
I didn’t think I’d be signing up as spambait…
re Inviteshare exposing email address….
No matter where you go to get an invite you will need to give others your email address. that is why you create a “spam only” email address from Yahoo or Gmail.
Regarding Mash..please feel free to forward an invite over here freetechzone@gmail.com
Thx for the heads up Mark – this looks like a good follow up to 360 which IMHO mainly suffered from being too early in the space. If Yahoo can leverage their huge traffic and network sites into a social networking extravaganza they’ll be doing a good thing for users and for Yahoo.
It’s a lot more fun then I expected.
Sounds useful, especially the wiki apsects. Can someone send me an invite?
marlon@whiteword.com
Glad to see something new coming out of there, but is anyone else fatigued with social networks, too? Do we really need another (does Yahoo need 2 — btw, kill that Yahoo 360 thing already, OK)? Do I have to merge my buddy list over yet again? And really, what’s the gain this time around? So I can edit my profile, and my buddy can, too, but so what? Facebook’s f8 platform is pretty cool, too, but it seems like a novelty that is wearing off. (how many apps can I add, and really, who cares?) What will Mash allow me to do that moves us all forward, and makes this more intrinsic to my online life? I don’t need a wiki. I don’t need a bunch of widgets. I already have all my friends. Looking forward to seeing what’s coming up as it rolls out of beta. I’m sure more ideas are coming, but maybe I’m too old for this stuff. It’s fun, but fun is fleeting.
Waiting for my invitation…
Once upon a time the yahoo brand represented all that was exciting and new about the web. mash is uninspired and unoriginal. yahoo, what happened?
Waiting for my invitation…
so is it mosh or mash?
Bring it on! Hope I get an early invite! I am so tired of y360 but really like the Flickr community and what you can do with it. I will be watching YMash very closely and jumping on the bandwagon as soon as possible!
hello
could you invite me to mash
thanks
facebook just lost 50% of its virtual price.
Keep waiting for the right time to sell, suckerberg
COMING SOON TO A PC NEAR YOU:
CashNet: need a little $$. Dip right into your friends bank account. They signed up for it so the friend won’t mind.
GASTRACKER: Now you and your friends can all notify each other when you rip a really bad FART. Isn’t that what friends are for?
Do we need another social network?
Looks dull and grey.. no life.
Now it is time to start backing up my nearly 200 blog entries on 360. I really like my 360 page and would rather have seen Yahoo fix the bugs insead of totally scrapping the project. I am wary and will proceed with caution.
Just signed up – not very impressed yet… It will be an uphill battle against Facebook and only by being more open (like status update APIs) they might be able to beat them in the long run.
But where’s Google?
Please send me one,thanks!
libing@gmail.com
Can you invite me as well?
behrangsa_at_yahoo_dot_com
Thanks.
Yahoo!Mash? Interesting choice of name. It sound to me very close to Mashable. I wonder what would happen if the little Mashable decides to sue Yahoo! for copyright infringements. It seems to be a trend these days (I don’t know if you heard about Lulu suing Hulu…
To be honest I have no reasons to complain about any of Yahoo!’s products so I don’t really see how they can fail now. But what is the point on creating a new social network when they already own so many?
Isn’t this a bit confusing for the users?
Yahoo 360 works just fine, and MySpace and Facebook already exist, so why the years-late duplication? Yahoo should have been spending time and $$$ polishing 360, getting the remaining small bugs out, and taking it out of beta.
Just what we needed, another social network…
Its about time, now if they will just do something with their teachers peer network – http://teachers.yahoo.com
Rich
http://rich.greenbush.us
======================================
Everybody dissing it is completely missing the point about why this is so fricking cool, revolutionary even. Obviously you either haven’t used it at all, or you only used it for a minute.
First of all, this site’s fun level is directly proportional to having actual friends. If you don’t have any friends, and not myspace “friends”, but real honest to goodness friends, you are going to completely miss out on more then half the fun. Rather then just being a number (as in “you have x number of friends”) that can *woohoo* leave a comment, your friends can actually interact with your page. They can put cool modules up, and change your background image, your module colors, and just about everything. They can tease you, compliment you, and amuse you. There’s a surprising amount of pull to this: you want to come back and see what your friends did to your page to fuck with you. And of course you want to fuck with them back.
Those who are worried about this newfound freedom completely missed all the permission controls, and revision history. You can set your site up to not be messed with, and you can revert it back to a previous version at any time. But you miss out on what is so cool and fun about this in the process. It’s the equivalent of going to a party and locking yourself in a closet.
Also not mentioned so far is the well placed integration of Ajax into site building. You input what you want to see right where you want to see it. Click on a box and start typing. Hit save and you are done. You never leave the page. That seems like a pretty simple feature, but it makes changing your page surprisingly painless and easy. I’m surprised we haven’t seen more of this.
Anyways, those of you who aren’t in a position to play with this (no friends?) don’t know what you are missing. I’m not even a fan of social networks and I wound up spending a couple hours screwing around with it last night. Given Yahoo’s ginourmous user base, I think this is going to have legs.
How Innovative! Another Social Site for me to waste more time and complicate my life even more! What a waste of money. Please don’t send me an invite.
B@lake Brannon
People who get into all this social networking apparently have NO real life.
I love Mash. It is definitely Web 3.0. As revolutionary as my invention of teh Internet.
You guys shouldn’t be posting your emails all over this site. Unless you love spam. I would use email warden.
With that in mind. Please send me an invite:
rethconwright27773@emailwarden.com
I have been using Yahoo 360 for more than a year and I stronly believe that Yahoo should polish it and fix its bugs rather than replace it with another service. There may not be many 360 users but the small comunity that uses it really enjoys the way it is setup.
UM, it pretty much sucks? “Cute” corporate titans in the web sphere seem to have a hard time pulling this off. Yahoo! 360 2.0 isn’t going to rock the world.