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.
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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?
