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

Anyway, after (more than) a few months of work, we’re finally launching The Wine Shelf (www.thewineshelf.com).

The Wine Shelf is the brainchild of Rod Haden – wine connoiseur, collector and marketing guru. He approached me late last year with the concept of bringing wine consumers closer to finding wines that they’d enjoy without having to go through the daunting task of searching through the aisles of large retail chains like Safeway, Costco, BevMo, etc.

At first glance, it might seem like a recommendation site like others in the wine industry, but it’s a lot more than that. Not only do you get valuable reviews from Rod himself (who is great for finding you the perfect Red wine to eat with some tacos), but it also helps you find the wine you’re looking for at the cheapest price in your neighborhood. You’ll know instantly if you have to drive 40 mins to the nearest K&L to get that special wine for your date, or if it’s available cheaper right down the street at Trader Joe’s (contrary to popular belief, this is not a true anecdote, I was not looking for a cheap wine for my date that night).

So I encourage you to check it out, delicious it, digg it, but above all, I hope you find it useful in your wine buying adventures. (If nothing else, you could always fill out the survey and get some free wine to get tipsy with)

After much searching, being unable to find a widget for the 2006 World Cup schedule (atleast for the Mac), I decided to code it up real quick. It was a very rush job – snippets of code thrown together – so it may be a little buggy. Please forward all bugs to me at mxz AT headphono DOT us. The current version is 1.00. Watch out for bug releases (if any).

As always, I’d love to hear all suggestions.

UPDATE: Direct download link here.