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The Silicon Valley company emphasised that it is in the early stages of testing the new site, which is completely independent from the existing Yahoo 360 degree profile service and has been established to compete with social networking heavyweights MySpace, Facebook and Bebo.

The site gives users the ability to edit their friend's profiles and add personal blurbs, subject to approval by the profile owner.

"Ongoing product innovation is important to Yahoo and we continue to test various products and services to gain feedback from our

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users. Mash, an experimental profile service, is an example of this ongoing testing," a company statement says.

Mash could eventually connect to a variety of existing Yahoo services and mini-applications known as widgets, acting as a personal profile on the internet or among a private group of friends, depending on individual preference. Yahoo has more than 500 million monthly users of its various services including a quarter million Yahoo Mail subscribers.

Yahoo has also acquired for undisclosed terms a company called BuzzTracker.com. The two-year-old start-up is an online news service that monitors 110,000 different sources, both traditional media and blogs, to identify hot topics.

On its site, BuzzTracker promises to offer users a way to create customized news feeds around a limitless number of topics of their own choosing. It gives Yahoo an alternative to rival Google News, which gathers news on various topics from a variety of conventional media sources.

The company's Chief Executive Alan Warms will run Yahoo News as its general manager.