Yahoo Mash why do you make it so hard for me to love you?

My first online e-mail account was through Yahoo! and have used a high percentage of their services at one time or another since then, ranging from web hosting to their fantasy sports. When I first used google to do a search I felt like I was cheating on my girlfriend, to say I was attached to yahoo was an understatement.

Over the years my loyalty to them has wanned a little bit, but still I want them to do well. Today I was going to write a review about their new social networking platform Mash. When I sat down to write it I couldn’t, not because I had writers block or anything like that. It was because it was going to be almost impossible for me to hide my bitter disappointment in them. Why can’t yahoo get social networking right? They have all these small components of it under their umbrella like  mybloglog, del.icio.us, and flickr, but can’t find a way to successfully put it together.

Mash comes off like more of a widget friendly version of Yahoo360, except without a focus on journal writing. Yahoo360 users that have tried Mash have been vocal in saying they prefer 360 to it. The sad thing is 360 is a pretty awful setup when compared to any other social networking site except something like Hoverspot, when people are clamoring for that over your new product you have a problem.

My issue with Mash is that it doesn’t seem clear what it wants to be. It has a lot of modules that focus on a lot of social sites and features like youtube, twitter, lastfm, rss feeds and the sites yahoo owns like mybloglog, del.icio.us, and flickr. When I see this it makes me believe that they want to be in the content aggregation business and I think the name indicates that, but yet they ignore other social networking sites, instant messaging platforms, and various other parts to social networking.

Because they are ignoring these other sites it leads me to believe that they want to be a social networking site, they are opening up their API like facebook, they have movable widgets like facebook, but they don’t offer a comprehensive messaging function. Wait a second, isn’t messaging a social networking staple? Also other features of most social networking sites like groups are a stand alone function on yahoo. As a social networking platform it isn’t very robust.

So who is yahoo going after? The features aren’t enough for a facebook or myspace user to switch. They don’t integrate enough social media for a user of multiple platforms to find it useful. And their established base of 360 users hasn’t been impressed. Where is yahoo going with this?

Please yahoo set a clear path…

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