Yahoo! M*A*S*H

After reading some early reviews on Yahoo! Mash—a new social network of the Facebook ilk—I was going to avoid it entirely. A friend signed me up, though, forcing me to take a look.

As a matter of practice, I don’t make much use of the Yahoo! suite of tools. Groups have been useful in the past, and—prior to Adium—the instant message client was my personal favorite desktop client. I’ve also dabbled in the Yahoo! fantasy sports pages, but there are better options for both tools and the recycled player notes now pervasively syndicated across the web. While my surfing has also crashed through news, Flickr, and local on occasion, the rest is largely a wasteland for me. The PC to Google’s Mac, the Quark Xpress to Facebook’s Pagemaker. I just choose to live elsewhere.

However, I am always intrigued by fake pets.

Mash—the Facebook-y social profile network Yahoo! recently released into the wild—has a default component of a pet that can be messed with by visitors to the page and needs care to be happy. The pet expresses its state as a series of whiteboard smiley-face sketches photographed as various emotions, including an exes-for-eyes death rictus. I discovered the latter when Tyler forced me into medic mode by griefing my pet to an untimely end. A shock and several disturbing snorgles later, and George was smiling again.

My previous experience with George the Bluebit made this an immediate hook, but it isn’t enough. If I were already a Yahoo! evangelist, it would be an easy matter to move in the content widgets for the rest of the Yahoo! universe. I’m not, so there is little incentive to use it. Facebook is appealing not just for the still constant stream of new applications leveraging the development API but also because the people with whom I interact on a regular basis are using that platform. However, in Facebook I’m the only one who can really muck with my own profile page, wall comments and graffiti aside. Not so with Mash.

From Wired News:

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.

That’s right: Your friends can edit your profile, by default. Mash expands virally by creating new profiles for people you know (or perhaps, those you don’t … yet). Once you claim your profile, you can change those settings to protect it from unwanted changes, or open up editing control to anyone.

For me, this is potentially a killer feature. It wiki-fies something that traditionally is proprietary, increasing the level of interaction with the site exponentially with the number of friends one has using the system. Like a wiki, it also opens up the possibility of a small percentage of a larger network taking some ownership of multiple profiles, policing them from socially unacceptable content. My presence on Mash can grow dynamically without much work on my part. If other users manage to create a MySpace-ish seizure waiting to happen, there is a nice “This is fugly” link that will strip out any flashing penguins and tame the content with a simpler theme.

Mash is a better GUI than MySpace, but it may be too constrained with the two-column format. That is largely a presentation issue. There is still quite a bit to do with the site in the form of integration with non-Yahoo! features. I can add my blog RSS, but not much else. Mash is intended to be a wrapping for other tools, or as Wired puts it: “Mash isn’t the platform, Yahoo is the platform.” That said, Mash does plan to open up access to module developers, ala Facebook.

In the meantime, feel free to muck with my profile. As long as George is happy, I’m happy.