Even though Yahoo (YHOO) has made a couple fairly big acquisitions, including Right Media, it looks like they're not interested in paying the high valuations attached to some social networking websites, and is going to create their own social networking community from the ground up.
Their new social network called "Mash," can be accessed by invitation only at this time (from existing users).
As zdnet says, "Yahoo isn’t reinventing the category – Mash mashes up MyYahoo, the likely extinct Yahoo 360 and Facebook features, with a profile page and modules, such as Flickr photo feeds, Astrology and a feed of friends updates. Yahoo plans to open module development to third parties, although its not clear whether it will allow access to the social graph as Facebook does."
Yahoo has a huge base of users already, this initiative is connected to their focus on increasing the time spent on their site, which is already one of the tops on the Internet, with U.S. visitors spending well over three hours monthly on their web properties.
To that end, the initial version of Mash, as Saul Hansell on the New York Times (NYT) "bits" blog says, "is focused on goofy self expression and social interplay. The lead section is a series of fill-in-the-blank statements like 'If I were an animal, I would be,' 'The soundtrack of my life' and 'My celebrity look-a-likes.'"
Another fun feature is the ability to edit one another's profiles; the first time I've seen that. While that has a Wikipedia feel to it, you can customize the controls so you can allow only who you want - or nobody - to do it. You can also change what someone else puts on your profile if you like.
Included with the site is another feature called Pulse, which is like the news feed included with Facebook. It has the feel of messages like Twitter where you can see what everyone is doing on the Mash network.
At this time there are a number of things not included with the site. There isn't much focus on music, places to put personal information you want to share with others or the ability to send messages privately to others.
Of course if the site catches on with users, it's not hard to quickly add these features as people request them.
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