"Mash" - Yahoo's latest attempt to crush rival social networks

The surging popularity of social-networking sites like MySpace.com and Facebook has apparently influenced Yahoo Inc. so much that it decided to launch a new social network, Yahoo Mash.

In an official blog posting, the Internet media company Yahoo! announced launch of its new website dubbed "Mash," and has invited a small group of outsiders, i.e. people who are not working with the company, to test the service.

"We just started inviting our friends outside Yahoo! to join us in testing Mash," stated Will Aldrich, the head of Mash, in the blog on Friday. "If you’ve used other online profiles before you’ll feel at home in Mash," he wrote. "But there are some new twists that make things a little interesting and, we think, a lot of fun."

With the launch of its new social network, which is by-invitation only for now and is still in alpha phase, Yahoo! is likely trying to catch up MySpace and Facebook in the social networking stakes.

‘Mash’ comes as Yahoo’s second attempt to grab the monster share of the social networking industry. Its previous social networking offering, Yahoo 360, has failed to gain much ground, and staggered badly in the booming social networking market. This personal communication portal similar to orkut and MySpace is currently in beta testing.

There are currently hundreds of social network sites, spanning a wide range of individuals, interests, and technological affordances, but Yahoo! claims that the new search engine “Mash” is different from other social networks since it enables users to customize their friends’ profiles and also allows them to "open" their own profiles only for those close and trusted friends.

"Of course, there are extensive privacy controls in Mash and you set the boundaries that you’re comfortable with," the blog stated. Even, with an undo option users can reverse each change made to their profile by others.

A list of modules has been provided for performing the profile layout. The modules like "The Mash Pet," the “guestbook module”, "Style this profile" module and an "advanced mode" can be added to the pages.

As the service is in its initial stages, it still misses a lot of obvious features. For example, there is no option provided to send a private message to users, and it lacks the place where users can put useful information about themselves.

In his blog, Aldrich also admitted that the service contains numerous bugs and also does not have all the features that the company aims to include in the final version. "There are bugs and we haven't gotten to several of the features it really should have. We need to hear from you about where to focus our efforts", Aldrich wrote.

For the last few years social networking has become one of the hottest areas of the Web. Recently, social networking portals like Cyworld, MySpace, orkut, and Facebook have captured the public's attention and attracted millions of users. MySpace and Facebook are the two "social networking" sites of explosive popularity among teenagers and college students.

MySpace, Facebook and other social networking sites allow users to create online profiles with photos, music, and personal information, including hometowns and education.

MySpace, the most popular social networking site, was acquired by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, parent company of FOX News in 2005 for US$580 million. According to Los Angeles based MySpace, the most widely-known lifestyle portal currently has 170 million user profiles and is adding 320,000 profiles per day.

The Palo Alto based Facebook initially was popular on college campuses, but evolved into a major social networking destination since it opened up registration to non-college students. Founded by Zuckerberg and his Harvard buddy, Dustin Moskovitz in February 2004, Facebook is the Internet’s second-largest social network, with 24 million members (less than half of whom are now in college), and adding about 150,000 each day. According to Zuckerberg, the online social networking directory, Facebook is the sixth most trafficked site in the U.S.

Founded by Stanford graduate students Jerry Yang and David Filo in January of 1994 and incorporated on March 2, 1995, Yahoo's popularity has increased manifolds, from the time it has come into operation and so has the range of features it offers, making it a kind of one-stop shop for all the popular activities of the Internet.