Absurd Singularity

So I've been clicking around Yahoo Mash over the weekend and while I'm no connoisseur of online social networks, it's got some interesting tidbits. The most obvious being the ability to modify not just your own profile, but the profile of any one else who lets you. By default, your profile is editable by your (soon to be ex-) "friends" but you can change that to just yourself, best friends, family or even anyone. And when I say modify, I mean modify. You can change pretty much everything except for your friend's display name, age/birthday and location. You can add modules to their page, rearrange their page, give their page a garish MySpace-type makeover, add porn clippings to their My Stuff module, write completely false information about them, etc. The sky's the limit. So choose your friends wisely. Or just change your setting so that only you can modify your page. But where's the fun in that?

Every change that is made to your page is logged however and their is a revisions page where everything that has happened to your page is listed in chronological order and where you can also choose to reject changes made by other people to your page which just removes them. So reverting your page back to some semblance of sanity isn't too difficult if you've been digitally toilet-papered.

The other feature that I thought was cool is the "this is fugly" link which basically strips the CSS of whatever profile you're currently viewing so that it appears in the plain jane black text on white background default appearance. This is for the safety of your eyeballs and your sanity when you accidentally come upon a profile by one of the artistically-challenged people out there who like to set really busy images as their page background or can't color-coordinate their way out of a paper bag. Often a problem that I witnessed on MySpace. Obviously it doesn't actually strip the CSS from the user's page, it just ignores it while you're viewing it. Pretty handy.

As for the rest of the site, the number of available modules to play with is relatively small currently but growing and what modules that do exist seem to be pretty basic at the moment and with a few of them it's not readily apparent what they're supposed to do or how you're supposed to use them. You're currently not able to change your page layout from the default two-column (left wide, right narrow) view but hopefully that'll be something that will be added later on. And unlike My Yahoo, any module can be dragged and dropped and reordered into either column which is nice (although there are some minor appearance bugs that need to be resolved with some of the modules when placed in the narrower right column). The default look of a profile seemed to me to be pretty plain and boring but I guess they're leaving it to the individual (and their friends & family) to jazz it up themselves.

And it also appears that they'll be opening it up for third-party developers to submit their own modules which apparently is Facebook-esque. I wouldn't know since I don't use Facebook. We'll see how that goes. Anyway, like I said, I'm not a big fan or user of social networks so I can't draw any comparisons between this and its predecessors and rivals but so far, I don't hate it. And messing around with your friend's profiles can be amusing. But we'll see how long that lasts. ;-) So if anyone would like to join in on the fun and I know you in some way, just let me know and I'll send an invite.