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Yahoo! Mash

Yahoo! has come up with its own networking space for users. It's been a week since they sent out invitations to the public to use Y! Mash, and I was privileged enough to be one of the first few to try it out.

It's supposed to be rivaling in the leagues of facebook, friendster, myspace etc getting a slice of the social networking cyberspace.

How did I come to find this out? Well firstly, someone invited me to try out Mash. Then I read it here http://www.marketing-interactive.com/news/3148.

As curious as most, I decided to set up my profile and tinkled about Y! Mash.

As a new user who's quite hooked on facebook, I wasn't quite fascinated at all. Facebook's page is sleek, neat and to the point. Mash's page is actually quite messy, and even to a point - confusing.

But I wanted to give it a chance. So I played about with everything, read the Mash blog and tried out some tricks here and there.

Like facebook, you could rearrange where you want the modules ("applications" as in facebook) to be.

The modules will soon be available to 3rd parties to design and come up with new ones. (which is a plus cos there aren't many modules available yet).

You have a Mash pet (like in one of the facebook applications - FluffFriends). You can even "snorgle" your pet. Which is rather cute. You could also change your pet to whatever you want it to be. If not the default will be a sketch of a face with moods.

You could change your own background - much similar to friendster and myspace - with basic knowledge of html. If not, if you see someone else's background and you like it, just "steal it" and change the picture. Like what I did. Haha.

The pages are much more personalized as compared to facebook but the problem is that it looks messy if someone uses a messy background picture. And it's tough looking at words against a messy background.

There's, however, this hover action that if you hover your mouse over a certain module, the background will change to a plain colour (you can choose which colour you want it to be) and you can read the words. So you mouse has to move wherever you wanna read the texts, which gets a little troublesome.

Something different from facebook, I actually like the fact that my messages (If i reply to someone else's guestbook) will show up in my own page.

I tried changing my profile picture. Nothing too tough there. But the negative thing is that I had to crop my picture. Something I didn't really fancy. Then after I uploaded it, and refreshed my profile page, my picture on my profile didn't show. I just though of it as a glitch and hoped that my picture would appear after a while. And it did. So just had to wait for a while.

Now about pictures. You could use a module to put your flickr photos in. But my photos didn't show up when I input my RSS. I have no idea why. Probably I'll have to wait a little before it happens - like as the profile pic.

Mash doesn't give you a lot of classifications about your friends either. They are either i "All", "best friends" or "family". Classifications are important and I think they should have that. Or like how we met a certain friend. That's what networking is about isn't it?

Actually this Mash thing could pick up pretty quickly with social networkers in cyberspace. But the downside is that you really need some basic html knowledge before your page looks cool enough (something that facebook doesn't need).

In my opinion, if it wants to be big, it should have all the basics in it (everything that friendster, facebook has, Mash SHOULD ALREADY have), then add additional stuffs to spice it up.

Yahoo! Mash is now only by invitation.

Anyhow, this Y! Mash is still pretty raw. We'll see how it all goes after a month :)

You could check out my Mash profile here http://mash.yahoo.com/peggytbj

**Disclaimer, above are some of MY opinion only. So just take it with a pinch of salt and try out Yahoo! Mash and judge it for yourself!

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