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Pras Sarkar blogs about web technology, music, social networks, digital identities and other random things.

Friend Finder on Mash

You should’ve heard of Mash by now, if not, get out of your cubbyhole and check out the latest social network offering from Yahoo!

The social network aspect isn’t new, but what is new is the fluid free-for-all profile mashing. Mash lets you change your friends’ profiles – whether its content styling changes or adding modules. Luckily, for those who are paranoid about having their precious profiles tampered with, you can turn off the feature.

Caution: Shameless plug from this point on.

Way back in August (I think), a few of us – Vinay Kakade, Ashwinder Ahluwalia and myself – got together to throw together a quick hack called “Discovr” for hack day. This hack demonstrated some of the powerful abilities to analyze your friends network and bring forth some possible connections (suggestions). It highlighted possible profiles that seemed highly likely to be your friend (but weren’t on your friend list already). Make sense? Anyway, we ended winning the “Most Promising” award for that hack day and we took this approach forward to Mash.

“Discovr” was born in Mash as the “Friend Finder v2″ module and after a few technical issues, we were up and running. At the time of this writing, we’re slowly inching up to almost a 1000 users, and the feedback that we’ve received so far has been very positive. Since Mash is lacking (for now) the ability to directly search for your friends, Friend Finder becomes very useful in finding these hidden connections in your organically growing network of friends. We surface these deep hidden connections and suggest these friends to you. Taking it one step further, once you add the module to someone else’s profile (whether they are your friend or not), it shows your friend recommendations through that person’s network of friends (this is a really cool aspect which needs a post of its own).

Check out the “Friend Finder v2″ module on Mash and hit me up if you have any feedback.

Profiles on Mash: Pras Sarkar, Vinay Kakade, Ashwinder Ahluwalia, Ramana Yerneni

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