Y!Mash test drive
Wednesday, September 19th, 2007
My friend Chad, who runs the Yahoo! Developer Network, was nice enough to send me an invite to the Mash beta. I’ve played with it for about an hour, and here are some of my initial thoughts.
First, I was really struck by the stark simplicity of the site. It has the ajax goodness of Flickr in many respects, albeit not nearly as well tested. In fact, the lowly Safari browser (I know, 5% of the market, big deal) can’t even update a profile on Mash yet. But, some pretty slick ajaxness is in there once you move into Firefox or (boooo!) IE.
Most of what you would expect to find on Facebook can be found here at the bare minimum. It will take some time before virus-like apps start to show up like they swarm inside FB, and maybe that’s not such a bad thing. I suppose we should enjoy the nothingness while we can.
Mash did take a few cues from MySpace as well, however, in the sense that you can customize your profile page’s look and feel in its “Style this profile” section. Font colors, link colors, background colors and images, even custom CSS. So, Mash will start to get “fugly” pretty soon, but that’s probably OK. Time will tell.
The “About Me” section is annoying, and I’d rather just remove it totally. Indeed, Mash really strikes me with its boxy grid as an old-school portal. There are “Remove” buttons on some widgets, but not others. That just makes the ones without that functionality seem all the more annoying and makes me want to crush them into little pieces.
The Settings section has a simple yet clean place to manage your privacy settings, people blocking, notifications and email management. There is an interesting controller called Simple URL, which will convert your Mash URL into a more vanity-like URL, using your Yahoo! ID. Now, is it just me or is that completely crazy? If you don’t go into your permissions and restrict access, changing that URL seems like you would just be begging for spam since your Yahoo! ID is exactly the same as your email address. It’s not like a vanity URL in myspace that you can simply make up - and it should be.
The Pulse page is very much the notification system similar to FB’s, where you can follow all of the Mash activity across your network. Nice that they’ve decided to move that over to another page, although I could see this being a widget I might want to add later to my top-level page and reduce clicks.
All-in-all, though, my initial feeling is Mash has serious potential. The guys over at Yahoo! seem to have built a pretty flexible foundation to add new functionality and applications. Add to that the possibilities of more closely integrating other Yahoo! apps into Mash (assuming that they can all talk together, in a platform sense) and voila! You might have a serious contender.
Yahoo!’s new social network, Y!Mash, was launched this week.
