Yahoo! introduced its newest social network called Yahoo! Mash. It’s still in beta, but you can get in by invitation. I got in through inviteshare.com (Thanks Ongo!). Naturally, you have to have a Yahoo! ID in order to sign-in, but if you don’t have one you can get it in about 30 seconds, the time it takes to sign-up for one.

The person who invited you makes the initial profile for you (other users can change the look of your profile by default, unless you restrict them through privacy settings). Upon first login you can choose to continue with the profile or start a new one from scratch. As you can see it’s a two-column layout, the left being the wider content column, and the right narrower which is great for inserting modules. Pretty much similar to a standard two-column blog template. Each bounded box can be moved (drag and drop) around the page, but the drop location will be geometrically consistent with the layout. This is good because it preserves the neat look of the page, unlike MySpace where you can put stuff all over the place (which, I guess, has its advantages if you know what you are doing).

Easily enough, you click on the appropriate places and fill in content (text) that will be shown from then on. You can add a background image, and set colors for fonts, borders and modules. Then comes the more fun part of choosing and adding modules. this is at the bottom of the profile page. For now there is a choice between some ten modules, but I expect the number to rise significantly in the near future (this is Beta after all). By the way, you can create your own modules if you are able enough, but this won’t happen for a couple of months yet. You can integrate a box with latest post titles from a blog feed, for example your own.

In the coming months we’re going to open up our module development platform to 3rd party developers.

While redesigning the look and feel of the page you can click on the link “this is fugly” to revert to the default stripped down look, or back again by clicking on “show me shiny”. If you play around long enough you can actually build a quite nice profile page.

In Settings, you can control who can see your profile, who can edit your profile (you, friends, best friends, family, all friends, anyone - keep it to yourself in the beginning), who can post to your guest book. Pretty much the usual, except for the “edit your profile” part.

Looks good so far, and really is a mash-up of different things (MySpace, Facebook) but brings some interesting new things. I will definitely play with it for a while (I like the easiness of the process) to see how far this will go. I would have liked to see an option to send people a link towards my profile page that would be visible to others on the Internet, without having to be signed-in on Yahoo!, but that’s maybe something that will happen in the future. There is the Y! Mash blog for more info. There is only the one introductory post so far, but I will follow it for further developments. Wanna get your own Yahoo! Mash profile? Head on over to InviteShare and register for an invitation, and possibly participate in sharing invitations to this and other services if you can (that’s the idea).

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