Yahoo! Unveils Mash, A Uniquely Open Social Network

You might not have known it, but for a while now, Yahoo! has had its own social network up and running. It’s true. It’s called Yahoo! 360, and it’s, well, not all that good. Thus it’s not very popular. Thus the general non-social impression the public has had about the company.

Yahoo! wants to change that. So it’s launched Mash, a site that promises, not unlike all other creations of its kind (the social networking kind, that is), to bring a lot of different information together into one place and display that information in a somewhat coherent fashion.

Mash is currently being kept in limited, beta-testing mode, available only to those who’ve received invites (unfortunately, I have not received one such golden ticket yet; perhaps its gone astray inside our wide world of tubes), but from the looks of things, it appears near ready for action in the open sea. Look for pretty quick growth from this one, even in private beta phase. Don’t be surprised if in the weeks to come you get invited to the party yourself. (Of course, if you’re already part of one or two or more social networks, you’ll likely wonder why oh why you need to join yet another. But in the spirit of the social Web, I suppose you simply have to grin and bear it and at least do so much as reserve yourself an account on the new network. It’s only customary.)

So, right now you’re probably wondering what, if anything, makes Mash special, and why it’s worth paying attention to. What sets it apart from the crowd, as it were?

Well, not a lot on the whole, really. You have to take it as a given that it’s going to wean some popular concepts from various other successful industry veterans of the Web 2.0 era – MySpace and it’s thematic customization options, for instance, or Facebook’s series of widgets and things. That said, there’s at least one thing specifically that lends itself a tag of partial originality. That thing – which I personally find very, very strange, just to be clear – is it’s open access structure.

No, not open access in the way of Yahoo! opening the new platform for third-party developments (which the company plans to do, by the bye). Rather, it’s a play on the Wikipedia model, where users may more or less edit the pages of “friends” – and vice versa.

Hmm, strange, you say. Why the heck would anyone want to do that, or have that reversely done to them? To be honest, I’ve no clue. I personally don’t see the benefit to such open-edit functions, but perhaps this feature might find adopters looking to get even friendlier and more interactive with their social circles on the Net than they do already. After all, if everyone knows they can edit the pages of those they associate with (I’m sure users will be able to choose whether such public edits can indeed be done to their pages, but lets just talk ideal for a moment), there’ll likely form quite interesting “mashups” for one another. Because, as we all know very well, friends do influence one another greatly, so why not carry that influential role to another level?

There’s no deny that the “Wikipedia” model is a gamble for Mash’s makers, but if it does take off, at least Yahoo! will rightly say that it’s succeeded with something none have tried before. The company will certainly have to send a note of appreciation to the inventors of the Wiki if it sees Mash fly to great heights, but we’ll only know if this is or is not the case as the months pass and the network grows. (Or doesn’t grow.)

For now, I’ll be betting that Mash’s “openness” turns out to be its secret sauce. Hey, someone’s got to pull for Yahoo!, right?