Yahoo Invites Us Into Mash, Its New Social Network
A little more than two months after we first reported rumors about Yahoo!'s new social network Mosh, the company has given us a preview of a social network with a slightly different name: Mash. — The service includes features common to Facebook, MySpace, and My Yahoo.
Context & Ripple Effects
Mash arrives mid-turnaround for Yahoo. The company closed its teen-oriented social product Mixd in March, a move Read/WriteWeb framed as fallout from last year's sharply worded internal Peanut Butter Manifesto memo demanding focus, and it has been layering social features onto older properties since updating My Web with social tools in 2006.
The preview also lands days after Yahoo locked in an exclusive display-and-video advertising partnership with Bebo across the UK and Ireland, giving it paid access to one of Europe's biggest social networks even as it builds a first-party rival to Facebook and MySpace at home.
First-order effects
- Yahoo's invited beta users get a profile product that openly borrows from Facebook and MySpace while tying into existing My Yahoo personalization, putting three social experiences inside one portal login.
- Facebook and MySpace gain another well-distributed challenger, though one arriving through invitation-only preview rather than open launch.
Second-order effects
- Yahoo's advertising business gets a potential new first-party social inventory source to sit alongside the Bebo partnership, letting it sell social placements it controls outright rather than renting reach from rivals.
- Developers around Yahoo's Hack@Yahoo! program and Open Hack Day get a fresh surface to build on, which is how Yahoo has been seeding its products with third-party tools this year.
Third-order effects
- If Mash follows the Mixd pattern, it reinforces the structural critique of the Peanut Butter Manifesto era: a portal trying many parallel social bets instead of consolidating behind one, with each closure resetting accumulated user graph and developer effort.
- For the wider industry, a major portal building its own social layer signals that social networking profiles were becoming table stakes attached to every consumer property, not a standalone market Facebook and MySpace could own unchallenged.
The trend: Portal-era incumbents like Yahoo are answering the social-network wave by iterating multiple in-house social products layered onto existing properties, rather than betting the company on a single standalone network.