Yahoo is preparing to launch Mash, a whimsical and quirky new social-networking service. The company claims it's the first one to let you mess with your friends' profiles.
The site, which is in invitation-only beta, gives you the option to leave your profile open to your friends, allowing them to make changes and add modules like widgets or games.
We played with the service at the Wired News office, and took turns jokingly adding pictures of unicorns and kittens to each other's profiles. This setting is the default for all new profiles, and when you invite a friend to join, you're encouraged to design a page for the prospective member by adding colors, text, RSS feeds and content modules. This can lead to some serious shenanigans. For example, it's possible to load up friends' pages with embarrassing background images, glittery text and garish color combinations before they even log in for the first time.
Of course, you can disable your friends' ability to "mash" your own page at any time.
Compared to the more-established social hubs on the web, Mash is a lightweight offering. It has its share of the usual widgets and games, but unlike almost every other social network, there's no blogging component, no photo-management tool, and no e-mail or contact management.
Yahoo's ambition isn't to make a stand-alone social network to compete with the Facebooks and MySpaces of the online world. Photo management, blogging and private communication are offloaded to other properties in Yahoo's stable. It's not integrated right now, but Yahoo says Mash will eventually become a layer on top of its various web services -- tying them together with a social glue.
"We see it one day being integrated into other spaces across the Yahoo network," says Yahoo's Terrell Karlsten. "Eventually, it will become a feature inside other services. For example, it's possible that you'll log into Yahoo Mail and see your profile along with all of your friends' profiles in your contact list."
In other words, Mash isn't the platform, Yahoo is the platform.
This isn't Yahoo's first attempt at friend-based social networking. The company already has a profile-based member directory and another, more blog-heavy offering called Yahoo 360. Karlsten says Yahoo won't shutter either product. Instead, users will likely be able to add blogs or feeds from those sites to their Mash profiles using modules.
On the surface, Mash's closest relative is Facebook. They both let users tweak profile layouts with drag-and-drop tools and a library of easy-to-add content modules. There's a Guestbook a la Facebook's "Wall," a "Blurt" box similar to Facebook's status update and a "Pulse" feed, which is essentially a Facebook news feed.
The design of the Mash site is clean and simple: It looks a lot like Yahoo's popular photo-sharing site, Flickr. From the yellow-tinted boxes denoting click-to-edit text fields to the menus that appear when you mouse over your friends' smiling faces, it's obvious the Mash team borrowed heavily from Flickr's aesthetic.
"We wanted to create something clean and easy to navigate," says Karlsten. "By doing so, we're able to put as much control as possible into the hands of the user."
All the elements on a profile page can be dragged and dropped into different locations, and changes to the layout and design are updated without a browser refresh.
The payoff is that Mash's flexibility is unmatched. Users can customize the look of just about anything on the page. Even those with zero web-design expertise can customize the colors and the layout. Of course, those familiar with stylesheets and HTML can dive deeper as well.
Along with the usual fare of images, widgets and animations, you can use specialized modules to add things like Flickr streams, Twitter feeds and RSS news feeds. There's also an odd, archaic module called the Mashpet, which is sort of a virtual (and demanding) Tamagotchi. All the modules available so far have been built by Yahoo, but the company plans to open up module creation to third-party developers soon.
It's dead easy to go off the deep end and quickly create a truly hideous-looking page. Thankfully, there's a "This is fugly" button at the top of every profile. Click it and all styling is stripped from the page, leaving only the user's content and a gray background
