“Since the past five years, social networking sites, an online place where a user can create a profile and build a personal network that connects him or her to other users, have rocketed from a niche activity into a vast event that engages tens of millions of internet users.”
“And it seems that Yahoo is getting ready to get in the game.”
San Francisco — Yahoo Inc. is testing an experimental social network service called Mash that makes it easy for Yahoo users to share tidbits of their lives with friends and family online, the company said on Sunday.
Yahoo apparently is foregoing the big acquisition path and its intention to take a slice of the social networking market after the launch of its new website titled Mash betting that it can succeed in a battle against Facebook, MySpace, Bebo and others, and has invited a handful of trial users last Friday.
Mash, to which a limited number of public users began being invited as testers on Friday, was described by a spokeswoman as a new, next-generation service that is independent from the company’s 2- year-old Yahoo 360 degree profile service.
The company’s latest attempt comes as Jerry Yang, Yahoo’s co-founder and chief executive, is trying to revitalize its internet business, which has suffered from slower growth relative to that of its rival, Google.
While Yahoo was early among Internet companies to embrace the trend toward sharing media with friends by purchasing start-ups like photo site Flickr.com, it has struggled to catch up with the Web’s biggest new trend: Social networking.
The news about Yahoo Mesh has emerged shortly after Yahoo announced that its UK and Ireland division will sell Bebo’s display advertising. Bebo is the number 1 social networking site in UK and Ireland and, according to the data released by comScore Media Metrix in July 2007 it has a monthly audience of 11.6 million users. Yahoo and Bebo announced also that Yahoo Answers will be integrated into Bebo’s and the development of a new Bebo Toolbar.
“The new service was apparently leaked by mistake by a Yahoo! employee while it was still in alpha phase, which means that it was supposed to only be tested internally within the company.”
It all started on Tuesday with an e-mail received by the New York Times’ journalist Brad Stone from a Yahoo employee. When Stone tried to open the link sent in e-mail to visit the profile set up for him by the Yahoo employee, he could not get past a login page.
“Here is an excerpt from the New York Times article recounting the apparent leak.”
"Yesterday I received an automated e-mail from a Yahoo employee saying that he had set up a profile for me on Yahoo’s new service, Yahoo Mash. “It is good to be loved,” the e-mail said.
“But it is no fun to be teased. I followed the link to mash.yahoo.com, which bounced me to a username/password page, titled Yahoo Guesthouse, where my Yahoo login information did not work. I pointed this out to the Yahoo employee, and he replied cryptically over e-mail:
“Yeah, I jumped the gun on inviting you. Not yet open to the public… Soon…” wrote Stone on his blog.
"About an hour later, I got an e-mail from a senior Yahoo spokeswoman, reiterating that the invitation had been premature. “We are currently testing this alpha service internally with Yahoo employees, as we do with most of our services, she said.”
Few days later on Friday the company launched the Yahoo Mash’s official blog and has started to invite people to test it.
“We just started inviting our friends outside Yahoo! to join us in testing Mash: a new approach to online profiles. If you have used other online profiles before you will feel at home in Mash. But there are some new twists that make things a little interesting and, we think, a lot of fun.
- You can make starter profiles for your friends. Think: “first round is on me.”
- You can leave your profile open to contributions by trusted friends.
- You can customize your — or your friend’s — profile with modules from a growing gallery of apps, wrote Will Aldrich on the Mash’s blog.
Yahoo! has also set up the “Mash Blog” to keep users updated and get feedback. Interestingly enough, the Mash Blog is powered by WordPress, and not Yahoo!’s own Yahoo! 360 blog service. Yahoo! 360, which offered more than just a blogging tool, is Yahoo!’s existing social networking site, and it remains to be seen what will happen to it now that Mash has been launched.
It is still unclear how Yahoo Mash will coexist with Yahoo 360 social network, which was launched by the company in March 2005. Is Yahoo Mash just a different service or in time those two social networks will be combined into a new one?
Of late, Social networking has exploded in popularity. MySpace, the world’s biggest social network, was sold to News Corp in 2005 for $580m. Facebook, MySpace’s next-biggest rival, is thought to have walked away from a $1bn buy-out offer from Yahoo last year. Facebook and its backers now believe the site could be worth $8bn-$10bn.
“Mash amounts to a new stab at competing with the likes of News Corp’s MySpace, Facebook, Bebo or Google’s Orkut, which have attracted tens of millions of users worldwide.”
Mash adds to a stable of Web 2.0 sites that have been acquired or developed by Yahoo. These include Flickr, the photo sharing service; del.icio.us, a website for sharing links on the internet; and Upcoming.org, an event planning service.
It seems pretty early to anticipate what Yahoo will do next, because Mash, as Aldrich pointed on the company’s blog, “Mash is still pretty raw–there are bugs and we have not gotten to several of the features it really should have”
According to the people at TechCrunch.com who got the chance to test the new service, Yahoo Mash has “features common to Facebook, MySpace, and My Yahoo.”
“You can load a set of modules onto your profile page and move them around drag-and-drop style. The modules include Flickr RSS, Ego Boost, Common Friends, MyMoshLog2, Blog Module (RSS 2.0), Asteroids, Astrology, PimpMyPet, Hover, Kaleidescope, Guestbook, and My Stuff.” said Mark Hendrickson in his review.
Eventually, Mash could connect to a variety of existing Yahoo services and mini-applications known as Widgets, acting as a personal profile both on the public Internet and among a private group of friends, depending on individual preference. Yahoo has more than 500 million monthly users of its various services including a quarter million Yahoo Mail e-mail users.
“Ongoing product innovation is important to Yahoo and we continue to test various products and services to gain feedback from our users. Mash, an experimental profile service, is an example of this ongoing testing,” a company statement said.
Mash marks Yahoo’s second attempt to cash in on the social networking craze. The first, a social network called Yahoo 360, has failed to gain much ground.
Those interested in getting a chance to receive Mash invitations may sign up for a free account at Mashable “http://www.mashable.com/” (click on the Invites section after signing up) and “http://www.inviteshare.com/” to be added to a waiting list.