Yahoo has released its social network “Mash” into beta, with a limited number of invites circulating around your favourite social networking sites. I’ve yet to actually play with it myself (not deigned to being big or influential enough to get any advance shares sadly), but I can already tell you that the advance press (from said blogs) is no different than what I would say:
It looks like “Yet Another” Social Networking site.
Its funny that way, I guess. When you’re amongst the first businesses to define an entirely new category of anything, your name becomes synonymous with that category. Classic examples of course are Kleenex (for paper tissues) and Xeroxing (photocopying). The social media scene is no different, except its tinged by a dash of geekish I told-you-so pathos.
Take the example of Digg — it was the first biggest and most successful social news site, and in doing so, grew and defined an entirely new category of online news. Every site that comes after has been thought of as a “Digg clone”, although the pejorative is nothing more than a short-hand of saying that “we have a news site that has voting of headlines — like what Digg did”.
Facebook and Myspace? Same thing.
And the bigger the parent “copier”, the bigger the crowing of “this is just like –” and “wait, isn’t this just a clone of — ” … ? And what about when that parent is a Web 1.0 property to bloggers love to hate for being so clumsy and slow for integrating their new social media purchases?
Bingo.
Yahoo suffers this perceptual double whammy — amongst social media adopters, anyway — and I suspect, at least a double whammy — in a different way — amongst anyone who has ever used Facebook before.
Has anyone considered, for example, how many of Yahoo’s own users are *also* Facebook or MySpace users?
Feature parity (the same kinds of features that are on every other site, such as internal messaging, friending, public boards, widgets, customizability, and so on) is probably the entry price for playing amongst other social players, but Yahoo has two giant hills to climb in this regard (the double whammy for regular users).
1. Making it a substantially better experience: And this refers to the “Yet-Another-itis” jab. Fine. Let it be in beta. But amongst the new features that will come out (and there had better be some), its got to better and more innovative than the competition. I have no idea what these will be, but you really have to give people a reason to settle into a new network — or, if they’re planning to integrate it, for example, for people with the same Yahoo ID (an obvious move) — you have to give them a reason to stop spending time in one place for another. Which leads me to …
2. Fighting lock in: The great advantage that Yahoo has is that there are millions of people already using its existing service in all kinds of ways. A social network has the potential to tie that altogether — but, when you’re fighting for early adopters and evangelizers of your service you can bet that a ton of them (all of them?) might already be on *another* social network, where all *their* friends are. In many respects this *is* a zero sum game, where I suspect many people don’t have time for two more more social networks *especially* if this is true for casual folk who make the bulk of social network users.
It remains to be seen what Yahoo does with its Mash property, and whether, for example, this is a part of the Yahoo! network that the higher ups are content to be “good enough” to compete, but not beat the competition with.
I’ve been guilty in the past as any other blogger about kicking Yahoo about its obvious problems, but it seems like Yahoo does have an opportunity here. How it contends with some of these difficulties remains to be seen.
