Yahoo Mash -Up

Rudolph Muller

Rudolph Muller is the editor at MyBroadband and covers telecoms and broadband news. Rudolph comes from an academic background, but left the University of...

Full Profile

E-mail

The new Yahoo social networking website, hosted at http://mash.yahoo.com/, is said to be similar in functionality to Facebook but with the added bonus of allowing members to edit other member’s profiles.

The idea behind this new twist is that more experienced members can assist their ‘newly-joined’ friends to create "starter profiles" – something which may help them to get on their feet faster.

Yahoo Mash developer Will Aldrich says “You can make starter profiles for your friends. Think: ‘first round’s on me.’ You can leave your profile open to contributions by trusted friends. You can customize your – or your friend’s – profile with modules from a growing gallery of apps.”

There may however be privacy concerns when using such a system, but Aldrich points out that there is little to fear: “Of course, there are extensive privacy controls in Mash and you set the boundaries that you’re comfortable with.”

According to Techcrunch, “Mash also has something called Pulse, which is very similar to Facebook’s news feed. The Pulse page shows “updates from your friends” that are basically Twitter-like messages reporting all of your friends’ activity on Mash.”

Currently the new Yahoo social networking service is open by invitation only – similar to the early days of GMail.