Yahoo! Mash: an interesting exercise in trust and control

Yahoo’s new social network service Mash is best described as Facebook-meets-43People with a hell of a lot more personalization options.

Like Facebook, MySpace, or BlackPlanet, you can create a profile with basic information about yourself and ‘friend’ other users. You can also add modules — what other sites call widgets or gadgets — to your profile. And yes, they plan to open their API to third party developers. Yahoo! also takes a page from its 360 product, allowing you to add RSS feeds to your page.

Something that differentiates Mash from other social network sites is the ridiculously-high level of design customization that you can do in a way that’s supported by the application.

Sure, you can slap a new skin on your MySpace page, but it’s a dirty hack that brings tears to the eyes of your average web developer. Mash, however, lets you add your own background photo (which is not yet copied to Yahoo’s servers; be aware of your bandwidth), and change your page colors. Mash takes it one step further, though, by supporting user-generated CSS and including it as an embedded(!) style sheet.

To invite a friend, you either send them an e-mail or create a profile (you have to know their e-mail address in order to create a profile). You can create a placeholder page for someone that they can then claim. Unclaimed pages are clearly marked as such. In that regard, it’s similar to Robot co-op’s 43people.

But here’s where Mash gets interesting — and presumably where it gets its name: you can edit your friends’ profiles, and reuse (some of) their content on your page.

That’s right: by default, your friends can create and edit your Yahoo! Mash page. You can restrict editing privileges to yourself or to your friends. You can also restrict editing to those users you designate as your closest friends and/or family. (And yes, you can edit other peoples’ edits on your page.)

Obviously, the ability to edit your friends’ pages and have them edit yours raises all kinds of questions about trust and privacy — namely, who do you trust and how much to you trust them not to reveal too much data or damage your reputation? And what about the ability to defame or bully someone? How much damage can someone do?

Are Yahoo’s current features — you have to know the other party’s email address in order to create and edit their profile, you can be notified of changes as they happen, and you can turn off the ability for others to edit your profile — enough? And finally what (else) can Yahoo! do to limit or prevent such abuse?