Green Tea Ice Cream

Just got a Yahoo Mash beta invite via Invite Share (note – Invite Share generated me an invite about 20 minutes after I registered. Nice.)

Inevitably, no-one I know seems to be on Mash and perhaps with good reason – it’s very, very beta. It’s also very Blogger with the personal profile pre-filled with questions like

• If I were an animal I would be…
• My celebrity look-alike is
• My best body part is…

and so on…Mash is certainly trying very hard; the AJAX interface is a good deal more responsive and open in feel than Facebook. Still – there’s a tremendous sense of catch-up. Facebook has a wall – Mash asks you to ‘Blurt’; Facebook has a newsfeed – Mash has ‘Pulse’ and so on. In fact, each feature has a self-consciously groovy name. Scott Karp thinks that Mash thinks he’s a teenager by default. (I might argue that social networking is all about being a teenager regardless of your physical age – in a good way…)

The all-pervading beta-ness is an issue – template customisation features really give you the opportunity to get in touch with your inner MySpace – but there’s no easy capacity to upload pictures that I can see – you need to specify URLs (update – there is for profile avatars but not for background images). The modules range from the obvious to the down-right weird – MG Seigler finds the “strange Tamagotchi-like” hand drawn face sitting by default in the right-hand column positively creepy.

It looks like you have complete carte-blanche to mess around with other people’s profiles, something unique to Mash and possibly with good reason. Alternatively, that could be the one feature that makes it stand out – if you’re careful who your friends are. Also (as Techcrunch notes), Mash is designed to leverage all Yahoo’s other properties such as Flickr; though (beta issue again), you’ll need to trawl through your Flickr account by hand and pull down RSS feeds for the Mash Flickr module yourself.

In contrast to early leaks, it doesn’t feel so much like a ‘funkier LinkedIn’ as a more juvenile Facebook. Is this really what the world needs? On the other hand, we could all do with a little time being juvenile every now and then.

If you’ve heavily invested in a number of Yahoo! profiles and if you manage your Mash privacy boundaries carefully, it could have a lot to offer. But at the moment, it’s impossible to judge. Like Sam Seth on Blognation, I can’t imagine investing a lot of time in Mash until Yahoo have at lest plumbed it properly into their own portfolio of properties and fixed some of the very obvious issues (contact list upload doesn’t seem to work, no image upload…).

Social Marketing Today are a little more generous, seeing it as pitched between a young Facebook and MySpace and reckoning that it’ll find it’s own niche. I can’t help feeling that Yahoo have rushed it out to try and capitalise on the gathering buzz and given how unfinished Mash is, that tactic may well back-fire. Still, I think I agree with Seigler that the very openness and the invitation to experiment, to take a bunch of white walls and go wild, could ultimately be something that sets them apart. The impact that Viacom’s Flux might have on all this is yet to be known.

Mash themselves, of course are thrilled we’re here. And if you’re on Mash and want to add me as a friend and mess with my space, go to it. Or feel free to tap me for an invite.

[Update - offer closed!]

Filed under: Yahoo, mash, social networks