brian's blog

Got a chance to play around this weekend with Yahoo's invite-only beta of its new Mash social networking platform. Here are some of my quick first impressions.

Pros:

• Slick, clean, intuitive UI; it's a nice experience, especially for a V1 product.
• Promising to open up the platform to third-party developers soon - and looks like it was designed from the ground up with this in mind
• The Karl Marx Paddleball is the best launch module of all - very Monty Python-esque

Cons:

• A curious lack of structured "About Me" info - your job, your school, your favorite movies, etc
• The Mash blog points out the capability to edit almost any part of someone else's profile as their biggest differentiator, but I'm not convinced of the long-term appeal. How many times will I want to add a new joke line to someone's "About Me" module before it gets old - or let someone else do that to me? I'd rather whitelist modules my friends can edit (Guestbooks, graffiti boards, etc) rather than allow them free reign to everything by default (I even accidentally deleted someone else's "Blurt" module today with a single click while poking around).
• Some people ruin the UI with awful, static background images on their profiles...very similar to MySpace. At least you can disable them with a click.
• Why can't I search for friends?

Overall, Yahoo Mash shows promise, but is a little underwhelming right now. It feels like Yahoo's trying to straddle a line between MySpace (limitless UI customization, lots of silly quizzes and toys) and Facebook (plug-in modules / developer platform, news feed). Considering the firehose of traffic Yahoo can provide, it seems bound to find a substantial audience. It seems hard to imagine an audience not already aware of or using MySpace/Facebook, though; perhaps Yahoo Mash may do well with the older, less tech-savvy crowd?