Yahoo! opened up their to the invitable public yesterday, much to my consternation. Normally I wouldn’t write about a YASN (unless it has something to do with missiles), but I’m a bit troubled by a particular aspect of Mash. Sayeth TechCrunch:
Users are encouraged to edit each other’s pages. Each time we visit our profile page, we are seeing new modules that others have loaded for us. This capability certainly adds to the “mashing” aspect of the social network. (Read the full writeup here.)
This aspect — being able to build your friends’ pages for them — was one of the key aspects of the syndeo::media’s little in-house project. You know, the one that I have been rather futilely trying to find spare time for. I guess it’s nice to be reminded that it’s possible for two very different teams (I don’t think you can get any more different than the big Y! and syndeo::media, in terms of resources, experience and general quality of working environments) to look at a problem and independently arrive at the same solution. (The problem, of course, being that there are too many non-participatory users on social-networks, and you need to compensate for their relative lack of inactivity by harnessing the power of the hyper-active population — basically those users who do nothing but update their Facebook status message real-time. These people would happily create profiles for their friends all day if you gave them the tools to do so, and that’s what Yahoo! Mash is trying to do.)
Of course, they’re doing it on a far more grandiose scale than we ever could, and I’m equal-parts challenged, peeved, and frightened. I like how they’ve combined invitation/profile-creation into a single action, which means that when your invited friend arrives on Mash, they simply "claim" the account that you’ve created for them. (From a technology standpoint, this is really easy to do, but it does a great job of emphasizing Mash’s USP.)
With the amount of client-work syndeo is currently handling, I can’t imagine how we could possibly stay on schedule with our little secret project. (I was trying to get our own invite-only alpha out the door by October, but that’s looking less and less likely.) Maybe it’s a good thing though; Yahoo! Mash is going to be a very interesting SN to watch, and it’ll be nice to see how they address the main problem of the "built-by-friends" solution, i.e., defending your profile against junk submissions.