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.

You may have heard Club Penguin was sold to Disney for a whopping $700 million penguins dollars. Whooooo, that’s a lot of money.  Who is Club Penguin, you might ask?  Why have I never heard of such a property going for such princely MySpace-ian sums? Remember, MySpace was scooped up for a then-mind-boggling $580 million [either the bubble is inflating, or Club Penguin is *that* important -- more on that in a minute].  Furthermore, why have my favourite bloggers not blogged about it?

First off, let’s get something out of the way.  Club Penguin is a social networking site.  For children.  Dressed in the trappings of a virtual world.  When you sign up, your avatar is a penguin, and you can make your penguin do cool things, and meet other friends, who are, as you might imagine penguins. 

Penguins?

No wonder my favourite bloggers haven’t been writing about it.  Well, if you have been paying attention, there is one that has: Mat Ingram.

In fact, Mat, who for the less informed, is also a technology writer for the Globe and Mail, mentioned it as early as January of this year, and intermittently since then.

But why?  Why bother mentioning a site that only kids will go to?  Probably because of its sheer size, the time spent on site, and what it represents.  Which is probably the reason why Mickey has opened his pockets to pay said shekels to Club Penguin.

And what does it represent?  Maybe the future.  As funny and silly, and *empty* as Second Life is (or, perhaps not), the idea of ‘virtual worlds’ isn’t all that wacky to several ‘web’ generations below ‘virtual’ geezers such as myself.  And this is something that I’ve written about before as well. 

There is an entire generation that doesn’t use email, because they find social networks like MySpace so useful.  That’s probably below me.

Below *THAT* (or maybe several layers below that) are kids who are aged 7-10, who use sites like Club Penguin, which are social networking sites, but use virtual avatars to run around in a virtual world.  South Korea has an analogue, but being several generations evolved than us (from a web perspective anyway), adults actually use the site.  You may have heard about it.  Its called “Cyworld”, and something like 90% of 20-something’s are on it. 

Ninety percent. 

I don’t know if Disney has these kind of numbers floating around their minds, but in many ways this makes a lot of sense from all kinds of perspectives.  It buys them instant credibility amongst their target demographic.  It gets their foot in the door with the whole “social networking thing” AND the whole “virtual worlds” thing as well.  Plus, because of the age group, the cranky old cynic in me says “it gets them when they’re young … really  young”. 

So is Club Penguin worth *more* than MySpace?  Hard to know in bubble-corrected dollars.  And that’s being only half-facetious now.  MySpace’s sale was (and correct me if I’m wrong) was really the first of the Really Big Buys.  YouTube’s sale to Google followed that, but once we crossed that rubicon, those NINE figure buys have only caused valuations for further social networking sites to go up. 

One thing is for sure.  I think many people don’t want to “miss” the boat, and I’m sure this is reflected in all kinds of sentiment from Madison Avenue to Silicon Valley.  But I think there’s something actually different about Club Penguin, in what it represents between virtual worlds and social networking, and what sites like it represent to an entirely new generation — some would say without hyperbole, the next generation — of web users. 

And if that’s the kind of fairie dust Disney’s trying to capture, I’ll second that as a smart move.  (What they end of up doing with it is entirely different proposition.)

You may or may not have heard about the results of some ethnographic research done by a Danah Boyd, a social scientist in the States, looking at the differences between MySpace and Facebook.  If you haven’t, go ahead and read it over here.  Very interesting stuff — in that it confirms what many intuitively understand about social networking sites in general.

Namely, that they are collections of individuls who are loosely defined by common interests, and therefore, they may have commonalities with respect to income, ethnicity, and, from a pragmatic point of view — purchasing power.

To sum it up?

Facebook – upper to middle class individuals who have gone, or who are going, to college.  Myspace — freaks, goths, emo kids, and other individuals interested in the non-mainstream, often lower earning and non-white with the expectation of not going to college.

I’m going to leave aside for the moment any references in the actual work demonstrating that there is proof for her assertions, and assume that it confirms my own biases toward these social networking sites.

Partly because the author seems to have a body of work in the area — and partly because I’m sure it will come out in some form or another.  And more importantly, when it does, reagrdless of how rigorous the study is, it will have an explosive effect in the news, given how prevalent both of these SNS are.

Which brings me to my real point.

Now, I’m not a VC and I don’t know exactly how companies are valued.  But isn’t the biggest question “how is this data going to affect how both of these companies are valued?”

More specifically — given how Rupert Murdoch might be looking to offload MySpace to Yahoo (certainly, more than Facebook is going to be sold), *could* this report damn all attempts to sell MySpace … to *any* potential suitor? 

Might Rupert Murdoch and Fox be looking at a kind of never-ending purgatory with their $500 million dollar buy? 

Well, that’s not entirely fair — I’m sure they have their own means to monetize the site, but its probably far and away from the 25% of Yahoo! … because I can promise you now that the data is out — and more to the point, that the confirmation of the *perception* of MySpace is out — Yahoo! won’t touch it with a 10 foot pole.

Not because it doesn’t make financial sense, specifically.  Maybe they have some grand plans to put *it* on “Yahoo rocket fuel” too (like Rivals) — maybe.

But the kind of reputation that Myspace now has — is that a fit for Yahoo?  Is that a fit for *any* brand that has the reserves to cash out Rupert Murdoch?

Does Microsoft want to be associated with ” immigrant teens, “burnouts,” “alternative kids,” “art fags,” punks, emos, goths, gangstas, and queer kids”? 

How about Disney?  Or Apple?

Any brands that do have a good fit (music companies, retail brands) — ones that might be edgier, that have an ‘alternative’ bent … do any of them have the reserves to purchase MySpace at a price that Rupert Murdoch is going to be happy with?

Of course not.

[Now, they might if they partner up with some VC cash, but that's an entirely different proposition].

Which leads me to the gut reaction that I had after I read this report: Rupert Murdoch, no matter where he is, is probably cursing Danah Boyd.  Cursing her and that report for trumping his plans for world domination flipping MySpace.  *OR* … merely telling everyone that which he already knew.  Which might be a reason for trying to move MySpace in the first place.

Well, some observations from the ever-observant Marshall Kirkpatrick, filtering through Mike Arrington and a few others, that MySpace News is teh dead. Or, something close to it. Crickets chirping, the slow silent death of unusage and all that rot.

This is absolutely no surprise.

I think part of the blame has to do with its poor user interface, and its premise as a half-baked social news - aggregating tool where users could only vote on news that was gathered/scraped/pre-approved, and not, for example, submit news.

I think the other part of the blame is just the users.

MySpace News, just like its upcoming video channels, are all brand extensions of a sort. Except that they don’t really make much sense to begin with, in so far as that MySpace, to many people who use it, doens’t “mean” News.

Yeah, I “get” that MySpace is “trying” something new. All that social media stuff — them kids are into it these days, right?

Except that, and this is entirely hypothetical and conjecture, I don’t think that MySpacers are the same kind of people who actively *use* social news.

I said it once a few weeks ago when it debuted, I still stand by it. The success of social news sites like Digg, Reddit and Netscape is that they were sure about their identity and their use — and people come *to* those sites for those reasons. Digg is the biggest, and I suspect, will remain the biggest, because it really had a significant first-mover advantage into that type of space.

MySpace is trying to graft a social news tool onto an existing social news site.

While I’m sure that MySpace New’s dismal failure has many different factors (such as, but not limited to, “where does a failure to promote MySpace News on MySpace” play into things), I do wonder about how many MySpacers know about, or even care about, the existence or usage of social news?

After all, the thought that MySpace could create a juggernaut in social news is only valid if, and only if, their population is predisposed to being keen to use it *anyway*.

I don’t have the data — but I suspect that they aren’t.

And if they aren’t, then no amount of fancifying the UI, or improving the mechanics, will really help it become anything but a third tier Digg clone.

You know — the kind that no one uses.