Half of the country’s tech bloggers and journalists, it seems, are under embargo around next week’s launch of Yahoo Buzz. Word has still leaked, likely from recently layed off Yahoo employees. We’re under embargo, too, so I can’t say much. But the posters up all over Yahoo give a taste of what is.
“We’re re-launching Yahoo! Buzz as a destination site where users determine the best stories & videos” – sounds a lot like Digg to me. The URL given in the poster – alpha.buzz.yahoo.com – can only be accessed by Yahoo employees. The launch URL will be buzz.yahoo.com. If you happen to be online, check out TechCrunch at 9 pm on Monday.
Hey, when are they relaunching their briefcase? ie., this http://drive.yahoo.com thingy?
BUZZZZ!
I love the guy hanging on for dear-life to the top of the page in the photo. Given Yahoo’s recent purge, seems somewhat metaphorical to me.
Ben – agree. Somewhat symbolic.
Why wouldn’t it be this?
http://ycorpblo...racks-the-buzz/
In celebration of Yahoo Buzz launching on Monday at 9PM, Popularo has moved our launch from Tuesday morning to Monday at 7PM (EST).
Wow, so I should tune in on Monday to see the unveiling of another Digg-clone? Tempting but I’ll pass. Is this the kind of innovation Msft has to look forward to? Metoo! has seriously lost their way. Even the model in the Buzz posters look their lost – one is barely hanging on to this ‘idea,’ another looks like she’s in store for a humpty-dumpty fall and the one on the far right is just hiding behind this crap.
Scott – your logo sucks. Oh, and nobody cares.
Lets see, Yahoo’s new approaches that are screwed up (but at least they look cool):
TV – Unusable format -quadruple the clicks to get data if you can get it at all
News message boards – Doesn’t exist anymore
News – Outdated or non-timely information, some haven’t been updated for weeks
Stock message boards – rampant Spam & trolls
Stock symbols lookup – Works some of the time
Groups – Spam & porno
Yahoo mail – many things I just don’t need but at least now it’s sloooow
Yahoo sport – Terrible format & dated information
and now Buzz…
In the American tradition of form over function… thank god for Goggle or we’d really be progressing to the stone age.
Art
From an original user with 80% of my time on the web spent at there sites, I’m now down to 30%
Why does Yahoo waste their time with projects like this instead of making search and advertising really work? Is Jerry Yang asleep at the wheel? Wait I forgot, he’s too busy fighting msft.
Why do techcrunch commenters like complaining about yahoo?
Yahoo is the place on the internet where good ideas go to die.
Agree with rashmi. I found yahoo search getting $#@#! And YPN is not so great!
I’d definetly like to hear more about this. I’ll check in on Monday
http://www.tech-exposed.com
Will the average Yahoo! user (mom40+) be interested in voting for stories? I don’t see that happening. This should have been one of those project killed off when the company said they were realigning people on strategic priorities.
haha. TechSilo, you cannot be serious. I went to your site and found a “tip” for sorting emails in your inbox. Mind you this is 2008. where was this insightful tip when everyone really needed it?
http://www.tech...o.blogspot.com/
Michael,
Thanks for the publicity, and for being respectful of our release schedule.
What is with the commenters here? Maybe they’d be happier reading Valleywag, since they clearly care more about bashing than about credible info. Since when is anything with a “vote” button a Digg clone? Oh, I forgot, Digg has a patent on social feedback.
(FYI, I’m the guy in the poster with the beard looking down. Those aren’t paid models, they’re just a few of the people who actually made the site happen.)
Wouldn’t it be this??? http://buzz.research.yahoo.com
In actuality they got the team of folks who are working on the site to stand in front of a blank white board and ham it up. It was a nice way to decompress for a moment during a challenging and very engaging project.
It’s easy to bash people who you don’t know, but for me these are bright, intelligent folks who are passionate about what they are working on. Please reserve your judgment on a project when all you’ve seen are screenshots. If the logo was not “yahoo” you’d probably be saying quite different things.
I did pose for the poster too, but I guess they ran out of space
@TechSilo
Yahoo! made it too difficult to sign up to YPN (and thus we and our friends never did). Don’t know how it (the YPN signup process) is like now, and, never a user, never knew if it’s good or bad. But Yahoo! should really look into it. Why the need to kinda assume people are bad guys to start with, and make the signup process way too complicated? (that said, don’t know still true, hope not.)
My over/under before Yahoo see this as a failed product is 24 months.
@BA
yes, the average yahoo user s a 40 year old female, maybe older – I mean, yahoo is 12 or so, an EON for an Internet company. These people have never heard of Digg, let alone slashdot and the other, quite frankly, “fringe” sites according to the general population. to “vote up” or participate in the popularity of a story is something that is edgy and new – smart of yahoo to know who uses them daily…
www. i-guide .ro
new blog online
I think this could actaully hurt digg in a big way. Digg are trying to attract a mainstream audience, Yahoo already has this audience and so if yahoo convert these people to buzz which isn’t going to be hard to do. Now what for digg? It’s turned its back on the early adopting tech crowd. Also if the commentors are a better quality on buzz they could lose ground to it.
Surely Internal Motivating Exercise.
http://tekno-wo...ld.blogspot.com
It looks like a cheesy ad from the 1980s or something someone would see in an outdated textbook. It gives me no desire to check out their service. What were they thinking?
Y! you have a decent track record with acquisitions. Aside from the difficulties in merging these sites (mybloglog, flickr, etc) with existing Yahoo memberships (the UI here is not the best), the products you’ve bought are actually pretty damn good. Stark contrast to the ‘me too’ products you’re building yourselves. Of course you have smart people working there and this is probably good for morale, etc, but what’s the real point? Rehashing old ideas (reddit, digg, propeller, hell even AOL beat you here with mgnet) is not a winning strategy. It also doesn’t say much for a company that’s struggling to remain relevant on the web. I wonder how this comment thread would have been if you had simply acquired a company that was already doing this? Worked with Flickr, yea? All that said, good luck with your launch – this was not intended to be a hate comment by any stretch.
The funny thing is that it doesn’t matter what techcrunch readers think about this. This product is not for you — digg is for you, and go ahead and keep using it (it’s cool). Last time I checked though, Yahoo had half a billion users, most of them are not interested in digg — this product is for *them*.
@#28: I think it does matter what TC readers think. If I’m not mistaken, that’s why the site’s writers report on these releases. In many ways the TC readers are the same as movie critics. While #28 or a film’s cast may not care about what critics think, it does affect the general public’s perception of the quality. More importantly, TC and this thread sets the tone for tech reporters worldwide. Sorry, I think it matters quite a bit what TC readers think.
There’s a lot going on in their internal poster. The blonde lady on the left looks to be the Product Manager and was probably criticized for all the energy she spent on making sure she was positioned above the Y! buzz logo (prime real estate). The guy with the backpack to her right is looking down at the guy holding on for dear life thinking, die, give me a sweet package and allow me to interview at Google openly (probably a sick front end developer). And wait, is that Jerry Yang hanging on for dear life? He’s trying to make it look like he’s holding on but that grin says “who’s driving me to the bank because I’m laughing too hard to drive?!” The young lady to Fake Jerry Yang’s right looks to be a very talented designer that’s completely oblivious to what’s going on. At the end of the day, Yahoo just provides her with free health care but the fulltime job kind of gets in the way of all her lucrative freelance design work. Lastly, the guy hiding on the right, any suggestions on what the metaphor is here?
Y! Should merge with E! and become EY!!
Or maybe it should mate with O and become YO!
Another Yahoo! failure.
What would be (to my mind) more impressive than a Digg clone, and more needed (and what came to mind with the term Yahoo Buzz) is – for lack of a better term – a “web intelligence” site, where one can really learn what is happening across the web (not that Digg doesn’t provide some of this already). Specifically, more of a business intelligence for the web. More than web numbers like Alexa, Hitwise, Compete, and more than trends like Google trends, but highly actionable information (BuzzMetrics, I think it’s called, is a good start of what I mean).
With information overload in spades, and web 3.0 on the horizen, making sense of what is available will increasingly become, perhaps, THE competitive advantage.
Yahoo, with its huge suite of consumer services, is (could be) well poised to lead such an effort.
Lets welcome the Buzz from Yahoo! Hope its a big one like what Q&A was!
I’ll DIGG it!…lol
In trembling fear of Yahoo launching a digg clone the same day we were going to launch our digg clone, we will shift our launch to the next day. And fold the following week. Anybody have any good ideas we can rip off next? This was our only one.
*Will the average Yahoo! user (mom40+) be interested in voting for stories? *
Who knows until someone tests the market.
There’s one thing for sure, the main Yahoo demographic probably don’t even know what digg is.
It probably hasn’t cost them very much in the scheme of things to role this out – they already have the infrastrucure and design and development teams. Plus they already have their own global marketing channel – they can get the message out about this to tens if not hundreds of millions of people at virtually no extra cost. They also have enormous brand recognition and trust with that massive older demographic which are being ignored by many web 2.0 companies.
The guy hanging from the sign is Jerry Yang’s little-known cousin, Derwood (the black sheep of the family.)
Derwood is best known for his failed video social networking site MeTube.
Yahoo Buzz sounds like Newsvine. A good model to copy.
@29
I think the movie critic analogy would work better if this group of readers had tastes that represent most web users. The big important critics spend some time thinking about what the masses will like, and give a nod to that in their critique.
In this case, the great majority of Yahoo users are not digg users, so they could care less if this comes second to market… It’s new to them!
So the success of the product will be based on whether folks like the stories it comes up with — this is much more important than what some self-important tech blog readers think. I hope that doesn’t hurt your ego too much — but it’s the same reason that even amongst the startups that techcrunch loves, only a handful go big. It’s the regular users that decide. Sorry.
Hey, I thought it’s already launched. It’s not even a Digg-clone or close to being one. I believe Yahoo cleverly connect the Buzz with its search results to increase Page Views for both sites.
http://www.monk...s-launched.html
Why does Yahoo keeping repeating these silly mistakes. Seems like some 9 year old is creating plans and strategies in this company. Use to be a good company with good researchers as well. Seems like it has a become a goat-rodeo session.
SG
I can’t wait for the yahoo buzz to come out, I’m very interested in what it will be like.
www. i-guide .ro
It would seem that Yahoo is searching for the next killer Application. I thought Yahoo already had this “buzz” product. Is this like new and improved head and shoulders. Next killer app for yahoo will incorporate video.