Y!Mash Yet Another Social Network. Why Indeed!

Yahoo! have just launched yet another social network (YASN) called Y!Mash. I got my invite this morning from a friend requesting that I claim my Y!Mash profile. e.g http://mash.yahoo.com/uk.blognation

Creating Your Account
It seems the only way right now to get a Y!Mash account is to have a friend “generously” create one for you and then email you the link in order to claim your profile. How very social?

Inviting Your Friends
Having claimed my profile, I then started the laborious process of once again adding in various friends, except sadly the gmail process did not work for me (I’ll try again later) and there was no address book upload for my mac address book or a CSV file import.

Social Portability
Most people I know are now so bored with creating new social networks and/or getting friends invites. Instead they are working on a solution called Social Network Portability to try and fix this painful issue.

• Jeremy Keith
• Brian Oberkirch
• Joseph Smarr
• Marc Canter

I had hoped that Yahoo!, given their widespread support of microformats, would have been one of the first companies to try and adopt/advance social portability with the advent of their own social network. Sadly not and equally surprising there is no support for hcard but promisingly there is support for XFN, so maybe social portability is still coming?

At Yahoo! we’ve been big microformat fans — Yahoo! Tech uses the hReview microformat for all product reviews, Flickr supports XFN and hCard on all profile pages, and our own Upcoming.org was the first big hCalendar supporter. Yahoo! Local blog

Sadly not, using Plaxo’s Open Social Graph tool Y! Mash is not supporting this functionality yet.

NOTE: verbose debugging is on
*** Crawling identity graph starting at http://mash.yahoo.com/uk.blognation ***
Crawling http://mash.yahoo.com/uk.blognation, referer =
- no rel=”me” links found
*** Done crawling -> analyzing graph for verified cycles ***
*** Done! Here’s what we found: http://mash.yahoo.com/uk.blognation

Pimping My Profile
Once I was into my profile I began to add in new modules from the gallery and change the appearance using simple Hex Codes and image files. And much like Facebook, I could simply drag and drop the modules around the screen to reorder them.

I added in a host of 3rd party modules:

• Last.FM
• Twitter
• Facebook
• Flickr
• RSS

But where were the Yahoo! modules such as maps, answers, delicious, upcoming or mybloglog? I assume these will becoming once Yahoo open the platform and allow others to create new modules.

In the coming months we’re going to open up our module development platform to 3rd party developers. Drop us a line at modules [at] yahoo-inc.com if you want to learn more. We’d love to hear from you!

Lifestream
I guess Yahoo! want Y!Mash to replace Yahoo 360 and/or My Yahoo and become the personal hub for my lifestream and Pulse to be the aggregated lifestream of my friends. (what does Plaxo think of Yahoo! using the same name?)

The Business
Unlike the few of us who have multiple social network accounts, the mass majority - Facebook (35m+) and MySpace (70m+) - don’t appear to worry about Social Portability and Open Standards. So if Yahoo! can convert many of their existing users over and attract a host of new customers, they will still grow Y! Mash to be a significant social network in which to place more adverts.

Equally I doubt that Yahoo! will retire any of its other properties - My Yahoo, GeoCities or Yahoo 360 - because the game for Google, Microsoft and Yahoo is to keep on creating more advertising real-estate opportunities, ergo Microsoft’s recent partnerships with Digg and Facebook and Google’s increasing application portfolio. e.g Google Presentation

Another raison d’etre for Y! Mash may go back to a conversation roundtable I had with Yahoo’s Bradley Horowitz a few months ago. He discussed the idea of a Yahoo creating a social network to capture my lifestream and attention across the web. I guess that Y! Mash is the embryonic result?

We discussed how social networks plus lifestreams when aggregating together all of my friends attention, could easily become “my discovery engine” i.e what are my friends listening to now, watching, buying etc. could enable me to discover new things. These trusted discovery engines won’t replace pure search but could simply be another way to find trusted information.

Ultimately it is a shame that Yahoo! didn’t take more time to integrate this new service with some of their existing portfolio and jump the technology curve by adopting some of the newer standards but they still have time. The trouble is will people give them more time to build the service they should have done first time around?

Personally I won’t be investing anytime in this service for now but I will come back to it in a few months time to see if anything has a changed. Right now I am investing my time in Plaxo and their Pulse as it is the most open of social networks and the one I think in the long-term will give me the greatest return.