A Digg-like social news aggregator from Yahoo is catching some Buzz. The new service allows anyone to vote on stories that may appear on Yahoo’s home page. It looks like the Internet giant is playing catch-up in a young wide-open market.
Digital Journal — Yahoo is jumping on the social news aggregator bandwagon by launching today a service called Buzz, which allows users to vote on stories on the Web to appear on the site’s front page. Yahoo wants to create a service like Digg.com in order to create “a lens on what people are most interested in…and help publishers deliver their best content to Yahoo’s broad and diverse audience.”
Yahoo Buzz measures user votes and search patterns to identify popular and timely stories and videos from large news sources like the New York Times and blogs like the Huffington Post. Stories with a high “Buzz Score” not only get promoted to the top of the Buzz page, but they also have a chance of making it to Yahoo’s home page.
Jeff Weiner, executive vice president, Yahoo Network Division, said in a released statement: “Yahoo Buzz is a good example of how we are continuing to innovate and open up our key starting points to third party publishers, making Yahoo! more social and personally relevant for our half a billion consumers.”
Yahoo is also combining its powerful search service with Buzz: when search traffic soars for an item or topic, it will get more “buzz,” and the score will be increased for that item.
In an effort to build relationships with third-party publishers, Buzz’s technology shuttles thousands of viewers to other news sources. It’s an idea that many publishers appreciate. Wired.com editor Evan Hansen said in the release:
Getting a link on Yahoo’s Front Page is like connecting to a fire hose. Thanks to this program, we got more than 2 million page views in less than two hours from a single headline.At first, Buzz will be working with 100 publishers, such as the New York Times, Washington Post, Newsweek and the Economist. In the future, though, Yahoo plans to open up Buzz to every site on the Web.
The service is a bold effort to enter the social news aggregator market. With sites like Digg and Reddit winning fans and credibility over the past few years, a young upstart needs to offer design and functionality that will differentiate itself from the main players. After a quick tour through the site, Buzz looks decent, but doesn’t jump out at you. And since anyone can vote on a story, there is no room for creating a network of like-minded news junkies. Then again, that sliver of an idea may not be Yahoo’s intention.
Yahoo is no fledgling at Web services, even if it’s not learning the mistakes of Netscape’s failed project in the same arena. Perhaps Yahoo Buzz will overpower Digg because of its sheer size; or perhaps Buzz will fall on its face because Web geeks prefer their own community. Digg is very, very well established.
Whatever the fate of Yahoo Buzz, it’s a sign of the times when major industry giants start regarding new trends with increased favour. Rest assured this won’t be Yahoo’s last attempt to create a Web project that brings user interactivity to everyday news.
