Mash? or Mess?

In an attempt to keep up with the times, Yahoo Inc. is in the testing stages of its new social network service called Mash.

Mash will enable Yahoo users to sustain their own profile, share photos from Flickr.com, create their own customized news feed, and add mini-applications. Yahoo says that Mash gives users the ability “to edit their friends profiles and add personal blurbs, subject to approval by the profile owner”. Yahoo also said on Friday that it had recently acquired a company called BuzzTracker.com, which promises to offer users, “a way to create customized news feeds around a limitless number of topics of their own choosing”.

Yahoo will capitalize on their already 500 million monthly users to gain feedback in the experimental stages, and hopefully capture as future users.

But is there room in social cyberspace for yet another networking site? With top-of-mind sites like MySpace, Facebook, Bebo and Orkut already dominating the field, I’m not so sure that Yahoo can compete. What will Mash give users that these other sites don’t already?

The creation of Mash is clearly Yahoo’s effort to get a piece of the growing market. But personally, I think they missed the boat. Smart Yahoo users have already created an account with one of the other, more established, social networking sites. It has simply taken Yahoo too long to enter the field. The earliest origins of social networking can be traced back to 1998 with the launch of Xanga , a site for sharing book and music reviews. The ever-popular Myspace launched in August of 2003, with Orkut following closely behind in January, 2004. Facebook got its start in early February of 2004, and although Bebo was the latest, founded in January of 2005, it is still the third most popular social networking website. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bebo)

As for user popularity, Myspace takes the prize with over 200 million users on September 7. “The service has gradually gained more popularity than similar websites to achieve nearly 80% of visits to online social networking websites” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myspace). As for Facebook, “from September 2006 to September 2007, it increased its ranking from 60 to 6th most visited web site, and was the number one site for photos in US, ahead of public sites such as Flickr [owned by Yahoo] with over 8.5 million photos uploaded daily. As of August 2007, Facebook had 39 million registered users” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook). Also in August of 2007, Orkut had over 67 million registered users (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orkut)

To give credit where it is due, Yahoo 360 is the closest Yahoo product to the other, more popular, social networking sites,
which launched in late March of 2005. But a spokeswoman said Friday that Mash is a “next-generation service that is independent from the company's 2-1/2 year-old Yahoo 360 degree profile service”.

Unfortunately, the reality is that Yahoo cannot expect to contend with these numbers and statistics of their competitors. Had Yahoo jumped in the game a year or two earlier with a “next generation service”, there might have been a chance. But unless Yahoo can give users a revolutionary site with brand new ideas and tools, they are setting themselves up for failure.

This post is in response to an article found at http://ca.today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=technologyNews&storyID=2007-09-17T190408Z_01_FLE756827_RTRIDST_0_TECH-YAHOO-MASH-1-COL.XML&archived=False