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.