First Look at Yahoo! Mash - WordPress SEO and Blog Marketing

Color me out of the loop; I’ve only just recently heard about Yahoo! Mash. But, that was enough for me to solicit an invitation to the service and start playing around with it. The reports so far, that it’s a combination of MySpace, Facebook, My Yahoo!, and (the defunct) Y! 360 all rolled up into a semi-wiki, are pretty accurate.

Once you’re signed in, the homepage of Mash shows you what your friends have recently done to their profiles – added, changed, removed – and what you’ve recently done to your profile. It’s reminiscent of Facebook and how it displays what your friends have been up to.

(Click on the image for a larger preview.)

Mash currently operates on an invite-only model (ala Gmail, Pownce, et al) which seems to be the current trend. Much like Gmail and other services, once you accept an invitation from someone, that person is automatically added to your “friends” list. You can also seek out other Mash members and add friends that way.

Though my settings allow anyone to view my profile, if you actually want to see it, then you’ll need to be a member of Mash already or you’ll be greeted with a blunt error message telling you to hit me up for an invite.

When you’re inside Mash, things are pretty straight forward. The Settings panel is where you can determine who’s allowed to view or edit your profile or add comments to your guestbook, update your e-mail notifications, and enable a more readable profile URL. The default profile URL is scary ugly and not at all easy to remember; I find it odd that they don’t set up the “Simple URL” as a default.

Click on the Pulse link will give you a snapshot of what your friends have done and are doing to their Mash profile. You can even read what they and others are blurting about them. By the way, a “blurt” is just like a little shout out.

But, that’s not where all the fun is – it’s all about the profile, baby. Too bad Mash still has some bugs to work out in that regard. All bugs aside, there are some main areas of your profile, such as about me, friends, tags, and guestbook. Don’t like something? Remove it. Want something else? Add it. It’s a matter of selecting which modules you want and where you want them to go.

The other neat thing I’ve noticed about Mash is that it allows some basic HTML to be entered within modules so you can use anchor text for the links to your websites instead of truncated or obscure URLs. Also, it has advanced CSS editing which is definitely a cut above MySpace. The only problem I’ve had with the profile customization so far is that none of the changes are saved for any duration of time, even when using the basic editor to select my background and text color. But, the plain white layout isn’t that bad to begin with, so I’m not sweating it.

Oh and how can I forget about the Mash Pet? Apparently, when you claim your profile, you get a pet that you need to feed, pet, and love like a real pet. If you don’t, it will die like a real pet. Unlike a real pet, though, he can be brought back to life.

If I didn’t know better, I’d say the Mash Pet (who I’ve named Bloopie) is a way to illicit regular return visits to the Mash profile page. Hey, you have to keep visiting if you wish to keep your pet alive.

At first blush, Mash looks to be a fun site and will probably be good for networking with folks who are already using Yahoo! for their other services (i.e. Mail and My Yahoo!), but it seems somewhat lacking. I can’t put my finger on what it is exactly, possibly that it’s still in closed invitation-only beta, but it probably won’t tear me away from Facebook any time soon.

Don’t let me discourage you, though. It could be fun, so get an invite, make some friends, and play around with your profile. I’m sure that once it’s opened to the public, it will start to hustle and bustle a bit.

yahoo mash, yahoo social network, social media marketing, yahoo 360