Yahoo Mash and Social Networks

I got an invite to Yahoo Mash and played around there for a bit and then I was reading Hsin’s blog and came across his post on social networks. And it got me thinking. I don’t necessarily agree with his rage against social networks being an old concept. Like it or not MySpace did pioneer or at least make viable a new thing. It’s true that we’ve had social networks in life prior to that, but the functionality availabie in MySpace was something new, linguistics aside. But what got me thinking was when he says:

Ultimately it boils down to how useful each of the site fulfill their purpose which often is for improving communication.

There’s a lot of backlash against social networking sites these days, simply because they take that label. But I think it’s unfair, sure there’s a lot of ‘em and sure a lot of them are basically the same - that shouldn’t condemn them all though. None of the existing platforms are perfect and there’s room for something great to come along. It is, though, increasingly important to differentiate new networks - there isn’t a point to creating one if you’re not coming to the table with something genuinely interesting. Doing the same thing, even doing the same thing a little better, just isn’t enough.

At this stage in the game, I think that the future of the networks lies in the quality of their API. Facebook changed the game forever and no new general network will be able to make a dent without an API. It needs to be great in terms of ease of use, power and integration with the platform. If it were me, I’d say it’d be worth not creating a new language as Facebook did and leveraging an existing one - ruby, perl, php, javascript. Take a cue from Adobe and even if you don’t use the exact language make something that smells quite like an existing one - a la ActionScript. Then you have a whole bunch of people for whom the learning curve is learning a few of your libraries - it probably makes it easier for them to integrate your network into their codebase if they happen to be the same language. But whatever, make your API great. Mash, I suspect, will have a really good API. Yahoo does these things right, look at YUI and Pipes.

The API will give you the longevity but you also need a schtick to get your initial userbase. How do you get big in the first place? The developers won’t come until your platform is established. Some kinda hook. Mash, for example, has at least one great hook. They’re Yahoo. That’s a tough one to top, sure it’s no guarantee, but it’s a pretty good starting point. I think the other big schtick that Mash has is their curious privilege system where you can allow your friends to update your profile. Interesting! I have no idea if people really want that, I can see it taking off or fizzling. But it’s definitely something new, as far as I can tell!

Then there’s the focus driven networks - like flickr and twitter. These are social networks, too, but they are kind of single minded as compared with the generalists like Facebook and MySpace. Any general network needs to be able to suck in that content and provide some hooks to present some or all of it. There’s just too much out there and everyone is a part of many of these networks, the generalist needs to be the point of unification otherwise it’s simply adding to the clutter. Much of that can happen via the API, but it needs the big ones right off the bat.

And with all this external data and all the activities that people are doing on the site what I think is going to be really important are easy ways to aggregate and summarize all this data. One of the best things for me about Facebook is keeping up with all sorts of people that I wouldn’t normally be able to keep in touch with. The Facebook news feed is amazing for me. Unfortunately, I’m a light user - I don’t have a ton of Facebook friends so it’s a very manageable stream of data. Others with tons and tons of friends have their news overloaded. Facebook tries to aggregate data and summarize, but there’s a lot of room for someone to come along with a fresh view of how to present that data in a useful way.

Customization of the pages is probably important, although honestly, I got no beef with Facebook’s plain jane just deal with it policy. But, a little customization would be nice. I dread MySpace and all things considered would rather none than too much, but perhaps there’s a middle ground. I think it’d be cool if in fact it was the network itself that created new themes that you could choose from with a couple customization points, like images or what not in specific places. Over time, there’d be lots of themes but everything would be managed and not horrendous. Mash takes a different and interesting approach where they allow you to customize your CSS but provide a panic button to your readers - if they simply can’t handle the design they can press a button on the page and get the standard mash layout. I don’t love it, but it’s a very reasonable way to deal with the problem.

One thing I’d love to see on a social network is a two way api. Facebook’s api is really good at letting you put info into it and shuffle it around, but you can’t really pull very much out. Now clearly, there’s some privacy and security issues with allowing data out, but I’m sure bright minds can figure out the way to do it. A network that has the confidence to allow a two way data flow, could really have something on their hands. A whole new class of application that spring up around it - I think that could have the effect of feeding people back into network. I don’t know… I’m just saying.

Anyhiz, from playing around with Mash, I think it’s promising, but it’s hard to tell. It’s definitely got the basics down. It will have an API, although possible not at launch (I think) - but with a name like Mash it’s got a lot to live up to on this front! It’s got that friends can edit your profile thing going for it, it’ll be interesting to see how that’s received. It’s ability to be customized will certainly draw in it’s share of adherents. With Yahoo’s gigantic network and massive portfolio of web2.0 startups, if Mash gets some tight integration with them all (uni or bi-directional integration) it could be really compelling. It’ll be interesting to see what it launches with and how quickly it can get to scale - I think Facebook had an easier time of it since there were plenty of people looking for a network that wasn’t MySpace. I’ve definitely got my eyes on it.

Oct 31st, 2007 · Comments RSS · · · · · Tags: social networks · web2.0 · yahoo