So it seems as some sort of aggregator, which allows you to use your contacts and services from third-part projects (Youtube, blogs, flickr and so on). Since I’ve got an invitation to Yahoo! Mash I was not to fail to discover that solution. There we are. Mash is obviously a breakthrough service among social networks. Calling of such every network is giving you ability to create you own page in order to present yourself, draw there your friends and organize your contacts.
Where is the trouble? Such a service has to be simple to understand and at the same time rich of user services. Mash developers managed to give both those advantages to their network. It’s enough to fill some lines to get your home page within Mash. Then you add new bars onto you page if you wish. Mash has a gallery of applications like Facebook.com. You can choose and pick up any you see fit to your page. Moreover you are able to structure application bars on you page with Drag&Drop like on Netvibes.com. But what is really “know-how”, your friends on Mash can edit your page (if you allow that). Now imagine, a girl has got an invitation. She got her home page, but she doesn’t know what to do with it. She is ready to put it away and forget it. A friend of hers adds some nice applications there and setup a glamour decoration. Now she is happy. She invites all her numberless friends to the page. Then she discovers a Pet gadget of her page. As she sees the Pet may be fed and petted she forces all her friend to give it a treat. That gives boundless potential of service spreading.
Mash looks as a well thought-out service, but I see an improvement the developers let pass. What all these social networks are about? To help a user to get new friends, help to choose from millions the people, who are really interesting for the user. The people who what to expand their circle of acquaintance wish to know before start of a conversation who is the potential interlocutor, would be he or her really conversable and interesting. MySpace asks users “describe yourself” to let others know you. Is it so easy to be honest with it? Somebody answers “I’m tall, strong and handsome”, somebody says “I’m so complicated”. That all is nothing for the one who is keen to form own opinion of a person. Well, Yahoo! Mash suggests to answer some questions like “If I were an animal, I would be”. As for me it hardly uncovers somebody to me as a person. Besides those questions rather remind me of job interview, but they don’t induce me to answer. Recall how pleasant conversations start in real life. You are in a train roomette amidst unknown people. Somebody starts with “By the way I had the other day such an interesting incident…” After some time everybody joins to the conversation with their own occurrences. So, it were so logical to answer people within social network profiles questions like “tell us what interesting happened to you recently” or “what funny you recall from your childhood”. Then developers can add a form to respond the user’s story with your own. Thus we can have a real alive conversation this way. I think developers will use such natural questions in social networks and we can find more people of kind we like.
I'm at Yahoo! Mash http://mash.yahoo.com/dsheiko
