Yahoo Buzz is launched. This should be probably the Yahoo’s answer to Digg. Let’s prove this theory.
At first look on Yahoo Buzz we see several categories of news and voting buttons aside of them with the ability to voting up. Digg principle so far. The difference of the new Yahoo service is that Yahoo Buzz seemed to be intended to work closely with Yahoo’s already existing news providers and services. I don’t see a way appear in for users to interact with the Yahoo Buzz content other than voting it up.
That principle is completely different to to Digg.com concept, where every user can submit the content. So I don’t know whether this can compete to the digg.com popularity. My fear is that people will find it boring to vote up only (except they believe to change the world)!
I think the main advantage of digg.com lies not in the possibility to vote up somebody’s content, but in the ability to share own content! That is maybe not so clear for you, when you are not experienced digger. However web masters and bloggers are highly interested to promote their content, digg.com provide them a good possibility for it. That is natural to vote up other content if you wish that somebody votes for your content too. Therefore the concept of friendship is so important on digg like sites. I don’t know which percentage of digg users has own website? But it think it will be over 80%. Does Yahoo don’t target this auditory???
I think that the Yahoo Buzz in the current version is only first step in this direction. Of cause Yahoo Buzz can’t be a competitor to digg.com at this stage, consequently next step of Yahoo people should be a some concept of allowing every user to submit their favorite content!
But we will see how it comes.
Update 2014: Yahoo! killed off Buzz on April 21, 2011. The company wrote in a brief statement:
This was a hard decision. However this will help us focus on our core strengths and new innovations.