Yahoo launches Buzz right on schedule
Yahoo Buzz, the Internet-meme-tracker-meets-social-news site we wrote about a few weeks back has finally gone live and is open to everyone. The service tracks popular content around the Web by mixing user searches with voting to promote stories to the front page.
As an added incentive to get on the site, Yahoo's taking a handful of the most popular stories from Buzz and putting them on the front page of Yahoo.com, a move that will send a lot of traffic to smaller sites where the content is being hosted.
While the service seems to lack some of the community hooks other social news services like Digg and Reddit offer, Buzz has an ace up its sleeve by providing related stories, which for the most part are pretty spot-on. This makes for a much more engaging content discovery experience, and something that's going to provide more clicks to stories that aren't making the front page.
The top of Buzz's page is a series of thumbnails taken from popular stories on the site.
(Credit: CNET Networks)
Vote for stories, although you can only go up, not down.
What's already quite strange about the service is the lack of user involvement that's been put in by design. While on the surface it appears as a social news site, there's no commenting system or any way to share what you've voted on with others. Unlike Netscape's Propeller, which did its best to emulate Digg, Buzz can continue to operate without human intervention. Speaking of which, there's no real upcoming section per se. You can locate stories with less buzz and promote them, but a certain amount of buzz is already given to stories that have been given some search love, making users dig deeper to reach the smaller stories.
If Yahoo was looking to take a chunk out of social news space, Buzz doesn't seem to be the answer. While the site is useful, Buzz is actually competing with sites like TechMeme, NewsPond, Spotplex, and Blogrunner when it comes to tracking the newest and most popular stories. In many ways Buzz is simply a reimagined front page for Yahoo.com, something that's self-maintaining and can be edited (albeit only upwards) by the masses.
Josh Lowensohn is an associate editor for Webware.com, CNET's blog about cool and otherwise useful Web applications and services. If you've found a site you'd like profiled, shoot him an e-mail. E-mail Josh.
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That's what you're supposed to do, you use the yahoo news site and read news and you vote on the story if you like it.
Its pretty awesome idea once people realise what you're supposed to do.
The lack of comment's system stops users getting power over the site like what happens on Digg.
I'm liking this non-communication thing going on, it means people can't create a yahoo buzz cult and go about being enemies of different sites, companies, governments and religions.
We all know that crazy stuff is going on over at Digg at the moment, and i'm not entirely sure its ethical.
Regards,
n3td3v
Also, those Buzz buttons of which you speak will be making their way to nearly every site as soon as Yahoo shares the code and opens it up to more publishers.
Back in the day in Yahoo News you could leave a comment under all the news articles, Yahoo scraped it though because certain users were taking over the site with a certain politcal view etc etc. I guess the minority spoil it for the majority. I'm thinking Yahoo don't want to return to comment's after what happened on the Yahoo News site. I can't remember, but I think they might of gotten into legal difficulties as well over it. I tried to find an article talking about it, because it was big news at the time. A search of Google doesn't bring up anything, maybe the index only crawl's article's of a certain age now. One thing I would like added to Yahoo Buzz is RSS feeds... they would be mighty useful.
Mary Pozo
mary pozo