Yahoo! Mash is a complete mesh

Over the weekend I got an invite to Yahoo!‘s new social networking site called Mash. At first glance it’s a little difficult to understand what it’s all about but through some playing I’ve come to the conclusion that despite some obvious social networking tools the only additional feature it offers is the ability to allow friends, contacts and the general public to mash up your profile with various applications and custom CSS styles.

While trying to combine MySpace (the individual page styling), Facebook (the simplicity of design and functionality) and Flickr (nifty AJAX effects) into one application I can see how it will provide some value for certain people however mashing up other people’s profiles might irritate a few discerning souls – me included.

One of the key elements missing from Mash is the ability to search for friends. The only way to find a friend is to either import your Gmail or Yahoo! contact list or invite individual friends to Mash and hope that they have a profile.

At the moment Mash invites happen by having one of your friends create a profile for you. Your friend can then add various items to your profile and when you accept the invitation your profile goes live in the Mash network and you get the following page.

At the bottom of your profile page is a styling box which allows you (and in case you didn’t get it before, anyone else) to style your profile page.

You can also add some applications to your profile but as you can see from the shot below there really is very little value in the applications available.

The only thing Yahoo! did right here is create some settings that you can change which controls who can edit and change your profile.

I don’t know, maybe I just don’t get this system but I really can’t see this becoming a threat to Facebook in any way. Possibly this is part of the reason why Yahoo! want to buy Facebook so badly?