Yahoo! Buzz, the social news service that launched in February and delivered giant piles of traffic to the lucky few websites that were indexed by the site, is tonight opening up to submissions from any site across the web. We warned that Buzz could eat Digg's lunch and that's never felt as true as it does tonight. The roll out of new open functionality will extend throughout the evening.
All the excitement aside, the most logical question to ask is this: will links that get rewarded by prominent placement on Buzz or even on the Yahoo.com front page be selected democratically by the votes of Buzz users? We don't think there's any reason to believe they will.
When Yahoo! launched Buzz, guest author Muhammad Saleem wrote one of the only positive reviews of the service here at RWW. He called it brilliant and predicted that Buzz and other similar sites could co-exist peacefully. Admittedly, that was before it opened up to all comers.
A month later Richard MacManus wrote here that Buzz was big and spelled trouble for Digg.
In May RWW hit the front page of Yahoo! via Buzz for the first time and saw substantial traffic and a whole lot of comments, despite making an appearance at an obscure hour. The post that hit Yahoo! was by Sarah Perez, about Wikipedia going to print.
One week later, traffic analysts ComScore reported that Buzz already had more traffic than Digg.
It's all good news for Buzz and the sites that get on it, right?
Are stories making the jump from Buzz to Yahoo.com based on the number of votes they receive? There's no indication of that and you can't blame Yahoo! for exercising some editorial control in defense of its brand. The story of Buzz may in fact be that user voted news sites are most viable when they operate as a hybrid of voting and editorial. Just what the criteria are remains a mystery, though.
The second question that has to be about the ad sharing agreement that Yahoo! required users to join as a part of being added to Buzz. Yahoo! told selected publishers that they had to be a part of the Yahoo! Publishers Network instead of AdSense. That didn't seem very realistic at the time and presumably the requirement goes out the window now. Or does it? Editorial and advertising weren't separated in the first iteration of Buzz - how separate will they be now?
Buzz is big news, it represents a big shift in the media landscape. Inevitably there will be questions of transparency, etc. that have to be dealt with. We hope they can be dealt with well so that Buzz can be a strong entrant into a new web of collaborative discovery.
Comments
Subscribe to comments for this post OR Subscribe to comments for all Read/WriteWeb posts
So will webmasters successfully game the system?
http://eurekadiary.com/193/game-on-yahoo-buzz-opens-to-public
Posted by: trigatch4 | August 18, 2008 8:13 PM
Yahoo is cool...
Buzz uppppp
Posted by: projectlib | August 18, 2008 8:27 PM
Yahoo! Buzz Rocks.. JAM 3.0 is super cool… I LOVE it.. who is the developer of that Flash JAM module by the way???
I am a fan of that guy… its brilliant!!!!
Posted by: Ramesh | August 18, 2008 9:09 PM
Absolute buzz!
Posted by: Qurat | August 18, 2008 9:24 PM
very good!thankyou
Posted by: angel | August 18, 2008 10:12 PM
What is a big question now is if we see Buzz gamed as heavily as Digg is. After all, it is too huge of a carrot not to try and game it.
Posted by: Svetlana Gladkova
|
August 18, 2008 10:37 PM
eh to be honest i've already grown accustomed to digg. I may check out yahoo buzz every now and then but I don't think im going to be switching over there just yet.
jacob
Posted by: Jacob Morgan | August 18, 2008 11:42 PM
Well we have to wait and see for its influence and any way i tried it for my blog.
Thank you for the information.
Posted by: suresh | August 18, 2008 11:43 PM
What's clear is that Y! Buzz isn't for us bloggers/ blog readers/ web fans. It's for average users that are so much more than us, fortunately. Digg is and would stay for a targeted audience (geeks, nerds, gamers, tech, web) and the rest for Y! Buzz. Which is a fine dividing line.
@Marshall: Regarding the last point, I'm not sure Y! Buzz would become a collective discovery tool but much more a new human aggregator of information (if we consider that Y! Buzz audience is the average Internet user). With big blogs that have become webzines and Internet version of newspapers and magazines.
Posted by: Romain | August 19, 2008 1:50 AM
Buzz is a big threat to Digg and many other social sites.
As far as it being democratic or not, I don't know. It's too early to tell.
But let's face it, Digg is not democratic either. It's a brute force popularity content for the players that the powers that be think should be the prom queens.
I for one am glad to see Buzz coming on strong and hope to see some traffic for our sites and our clients sites there.
Thanks for the article. Nice read.
Posted by: Business Blogs | August 19, 2008 7:41 PM