Yahoo takes aim at Facebook with Mash

Yahoo Inc. is testing the waters of social networking with an experimental site of its own, called Mash, which lets users edit each other's profiles.

The internet company began publicly testing the site by invitation only on Friday, with an eye to eventually luring people away from the two most popular social networking sites, Facebook and MySpace. According to reports, Mash is similar to Facebook in that users post profiles and create lists of friends. Yahoo's site, however, incorporates elements of Wikipedia, the online dictionary that anyone can edit, by allowing people to make changes on their friends' profiles.

Users can change information in others' profiles, the appearance of their page or add features. They can also control how much others are allowed to edit their pages by changing their settings, and canopt to allow only best friends or family to make changes, or to disallow any edits.

"There are extensive privacy controls in Mash and you set the boundaries that youre comfortable with," wrote Will Aldrich, Mash's head developer, on the site's blog.

Yahoo is also allowing people to make "starter profiles" for their friends, to entice them onto the site.

The site is so far aiming at a young crowd, according to reports, using "hip" terminology. Users are able to describea friend's page as "fugly," while e-mail notifications of new friends start off by saying "Woot."

Like Facebook, the site also incorporates optional applications, including a "Wheel of Lunch," where users can randomly determine where to eat by typing in their location and type of food they want.

Yahoo, which is under pressure from shareholders to makean impact in so-called collaborative Web 2.0 services,has not said when it might open the site up to the public.

The company's previous social networking attempt, Yahoo 360, failed to gain traction. Yahoo was, however, one of the first companies to score a hit with Web 2.0 services when it bought photo-sharing site Flickr two years ago.