Warning - Yahoo! Mash is beta software so what follows here is a knee jerk reaction to software that may not go live (please don’t put this live).

Yahoo!, look I love you guy’s. With that in mind I am going to give you a little advice, don’t put Mash live to the public. Once in a while you just need someone to tell you things directly. I am trying to help you here. If you were a drug addict this is where an intervention would happen. Please, I am telling you these things for your own good.

I’d like to say that Yahoo! just missed the boat on this and it might evolve into something over time. But I don’t want to lie to everyone. They didn’t miss the boat, they just built the dock in the desert. Yahoo! Mash is basically Yahoo! 360 with every thing editable minus the few improvements that Yahoo! 360 had going for it (like a blog, hello!). I couldn’t find a way to search for people with similar interests, I couldn’t find groups, basically you can connect to the people in your address book and that is where it seems to end. Maybe I should wait for it to go live and see what happens. They did add in modules which act similar to a Facebook application and it appears that at some point developers will have an API to create their own applications.

So let me recap. The good points: 1. Everything is editable, 2. Modules plus (in the future) an API. The bad points, well there are just to many to list so I will just point out this one, Yahoo! doesn’t get it. Save yourselves some time and effort, add the two good points to what you have started at Y!360 and toss it some developers and a community evangelist. In the end you will be better off.

Yahoo! inadvertently spilled the beans to the New York Times about a new service they are going to offer called Yahoo Mash. Well TechCrunch got it nearly correct when they reported that Yahoo! was working on their next generation social network called Mosh. So the big question I hope is on everyones mind is; what happened to Y!360?

I am glad you asked that question because it needs to be dealt with by Yahoo! in order to make their next social network site a success. I blogged about what I thought were some of Yahoo!’s mistakes back in July (see “Why Yahoo! 360 failed”). I have not changed my opinion on why Y!360 failed.

Facebook has been successful because it has allowed people to interact with each other in ways Y!360 never did. I hope Yahoo! has been watching.

I would add one more thing that caused Y!360 to fail. Yahoo! was nimble enough to change. Facebook and MySpace is not rocket science. Little innovation exists in either of these sites. Yahoo! has a lot of talented software engineers. Let them do their job and move management out of the way. If you don’t I don’t think Yahoo! will get a third chance.

Sure, they wont see it that way. The Netscape brand name has been twisted and turned no many times no one knows what it stands for anymore. Just as Netscape was finally making an identity for itself, great social news site, fantastic modern social browser, and from all outward appearance was doing well (at least up to the point that Jason Calacanis left); AOL, in an obvious move to do something with its tarnished brand and lack luster portal, is trying to suck the traffic off of its highly neglected, ill thought out purchase nearly a decade ago.

But we all really saw this coming when AOL swapped out a new media forward thinker with an old media thinker. The same mentality that is killing the music industry is now killing Netscape.

Netscape claims in their blog that the current incarnation of Netscape the social site will live on under a new name somewhere, but they failed to mention where, further inviting speculation that it’s over. The current Netscape site will be redirected soon down the AOL black hole of old tired media portal’s.

You may notice that I am not linking to Netscape or AOL in any of this and for good reason. I just don’t believe I should send traffic to a company so undeserving of people’s loyalty.

Note to Jason Calacanis:

Just before you left I was interviewing for a developer job with Tom Drapeau. Netscape was my dream job. Highly talented group, pushing the new media envelope creating wonderfully sophisticated software in a dispersed office environment. I pulled myself out of the interview process because everyone seemed distracted. Shortly after that the AOL CEO was replaced, you (Jason) left followed shortly by C.K. Sample. In hindsight I am glad I stopped pursuing the job despite it being a dream job.

I remember your blog post “I wish I was still running Netscape.” Well Netscape is now dead so Netscape will never be available for purchase. But there is a void in the social news space for something more refined and better engineered than Digg now and I know a group of developers that have great experience. Maybe it’s time for the human-powered news to marry up with the human-powered search engine (Mahalo) with a social browser kicked in for good measure. I suspect they will all need work shortly.

Jason probably won’t see it this way. You see he is a business man that happens to hawk technology products. He is fairly successful at it too I might add. He is not a technologist and lacks a certain passion for technology that would have made this missed opportunity stand out to him. So what am I talking about?

Yesterday Jason posted his profile pages in his blog. This would have been a great opportunity to showcase some new technology like FOAF. Better yet he could have simply linked to his lifestream (see my lifestream as a example) and saved us all the trouble of looking in eight different locations to see what he has to say.

I guess that is the difference between selling technology that is good and selling good technology. It’s all a matter of perspective.

I have finally found my dream application - Tabber. It’s rough around the edges. It lacks the usability that Spokeo has for reading your friends posts. You add your feeds/sites and it will auto-discover your friends. It builds a list creating your lifestream and attaches you to a list of your friends lifestreams.

This seems to all be accomplished by using a combination of the hCard microformat and RSS feeds. I admit it isn’t perfect. For instance I have someone I am linked to on Twitter and also linked to in del.icio.us, but since they have different screen names they show as two contacts. Perhaps they have a way of telling them apart if the hCard contained more information.

The big thing that I see lacking, besides the desperate need of a graphic designer, is the inclusion and utilization of FOAF information. Once I put in my FOAF info it could grab my friends info and possibly de-dupe.

Despite the minor roughness, this is the ideal social application and a fantastic use of microformats. I can’t believe Google hasn’t snatched this up to integrate into Blogger or Yahoo! to integrate into Y360 (did they abandon this?)

I have blogged about lifestream’s before (see Lifestreaming outside the box). I looked around for a good service to deal with creating and publishing a lifestream but haven’t been completely impressed by any of them. I had been using Lijit for a while, but it didn’t give me the ability to publish out a stream like I am doing here. It didn’t give me the ability to edit the feed title so I had this list of verbose feeds some not entirely making sense. And, as I found with most of them, they wanted to add extra junk I didn’t want, like search my feed. If you want to search my feed go to Google and limit by url.

Too much clutter.

So it had to go in and be replaced by the much cleaner list you see in the center. I publish an aggregated feed of my lifestream using Yahoo! Pipes which is perfect for this although I did look at Feed Digest to deal with this but found it’s interface muddled and I wasn’t clear what it was going to produce in the end so I went back to what I know. Probably not a fair evaluation but it is what it is.

Now for the interested, you can see everywhere I post on the Lifestream page. Not really I limit it to six of my most used feeds and I limit the web page to only display the last three days. If you are interested in what I posted older than that subscribe to the feed.

This is built using a brilliant PHP software package called SimplePie to manipulate the RSS feeds. If you need to parse RSS feeds, use this class.

• microformatique - a blog about microformats and data at the edges : from little things, big things grow
  (tags: blog microformats semanticweb)
• Operator
  (tags: microformats firefox extension)
• SimplePie: Super-fast, easy-to-use, RSS and Atom Parsing.
  (tags: rss php programming atom)