Buzz, Yahoo’s Digg-like effort to leverage reader gestures and third party content in determining the most popular news, removes it’s barriers to entry tonight.
Until now only a hundred or so invited publishers could post news to Buzz. This was a big plug – Yahoo pushes a few Yahoo Buzz stories to their home page every day, resulting in huge, server-melting traffic surges to the lucky third party sites. Starting tonight, the invitation requirement is gone, and anyone can submit their stories to Buzz.
It’s hard to compare Buzz to Digg. Like AOL’s Propeller, they chose to add editorial discretion in determining headlines to reduce gaming. That also seems to make users less interested in participating, though. In Yahoo’s case the fact that they promote headline stories on the home page of Yahoo gives them a huge traffic boost, which skews results.
Stories can be submitted here once it goes live in a few hours.
Well…I know you have sung it’s praise from the very outset so I am sure bloggers will be elated…
This is great news for smaller publishers and people who would want to taste the traffic Yahoo Buzz provided
What’s more, all those smaller publishers will rush to Buzz now trying to game it and get to the top. It will really be an exciting thing to watch.
Buzz is live in the Add to Any Share / Save widget for all publishers:
http://www.addtoany.com/
Still waiting for Buzz to accept new publisher content though.
Yes… I will test it for a while for sure…
Tonight, meaning not yet? I checked out the site and they seem to only allow publishers to add their email to a list.
Glad to see Buzz finally opening up its doors though to others. What an amazing deal to the select few publishers who had months of free traffic from it.
I wonder if increased popularity will eventually force them to open up the promotion process fully, ala Digg, or if they will maintain their current model of editorial moderation. Isn’t this why initial Digg clones, such as Netscape project ultimately failed?
As one of the lucky beta publishers, I can say that from Yahoo’s perspective, Buzz is a well-implemented idea to always a ton of fresh content to choose from for promotion to the Y! frontpage. But, with only a few mainstream-oriented stories going to their frontpage per day, it won’t bring much (or anything) to the hundreds of small publishers who are licking their chops right now. Sorry, Y! is looking for the big story that slips through the cracks, and using your small-time ass to find it. Hope you don’t mind.
Yahoo buzz is great if you make it to the Front page. However, what about the sites that sit back in the yahoo buzz section? i wonder how they fare compared to digg.
open but i bet yahoo still manually controls who goes to front page
ehh, another half ass product.
This will go the way of Y!Kickstart in a couple months
YKickstart?? Do you make this stuff up??
Stop bashing Yahoo…geeze!
It will be interesting to see how this compares to things like digg.
Hopefully, smaller publishers will have a chance to get some visibility (while the competition for the front page is still reasonably low).
Yahoo! Buzz Rocks.. JAM 3.0 is super cool… I LOVE it.. who is the developer of that Flash JAM by the way???
I am a fan of that guy… its brilliant!!!!
It’s its.
I’ve been waiting for this. I never thought it was fair that Techcrunch was able to use it and not our blog. I will use Yahoo buzz now, starting tomorrow.
BTW, TechCrunch totally missed the Tatango launch. I covered it and I am giving the first 3 commenters on our story private invites.
TL – http://xrl.us/moretechnews
Spam.
Buzz is great, thought hard to compare with Digg, but it has it’s own place. Don’t know how well they are going to manage editorial thingy to reducing gaming, but it will definitely be a good addition and a distinguishing feature!
Score another for Yahoo!
We have a story that is #1 on “business” up and comer and #3 “all” up and comer but it has not yet been graduated to the buzz list yet, let alone the front page of Yahoo
I hope this is just a case of the editors haven’t come into work yet.
Here is the story on biz (Aurelian Online Shareholder Revolt)
http://buzz.yah...UahjJEWPFuW7J14
Regards,
George
And here is the eventual problem they will be dealing with: Gaming the system to get your story to the top.
This dude is doing this in a comment on a large blog. Imagine IRC, IM, Twitter usage across networks of people.
TC itself solicits Diggs on a weekly basis.
I’m looking forward to Yahoo Buzz being opened up to the public. I have been using Yahoo Buzz quite a bit recently just to see what people are talking about and interested in.
http://kreuzer3...-on-yahoo-buzz/
Thats Gr8 new for all Publishers
Michael, we have now officially taken top spot on Yahoo Buzz (Business) on the first day:
http://blog.ago...z-on-first-day/
Thanks for the heads up this morning. If I hadn’t seen your post, I wouldn’t have posted to Yahoo Buzz, etc, etc.
Love the web.
George
I think Yahoo Buzz is going to be a home run for Yahoo. It will be interesting to see what kind of demographic will be using Buzz as it becomes more widely known.
I’ve just submitted my first story and it just made it to the front page of the business section. I’m seeing some traffic pick up. We’ll see by tomorrow exactly how much it brings. I’m hoping it melts my server
Looks like yahoo is posed for a comeback. I have noticed a lot of mybloglog activity which is good for yahoo I guess and now this. Things are finally working out for yahoo again.
But is any one tired of all these sites, way too many to keep up with especially if you own a blog. May be I will come up with a good plugin for wordpress which can do it all.
It seems very good. The only thing I miss it’s the profile system which you can comment, flag users and that things…
This is wonderful. Finally, a decent alternative to Digg, but hopefully not dominated by Digg users. Not that we don’t like diggers, but their stuff seems mostly one dimensional in nature.
I think that it’s a great idea, but haven’t determined if I like it or not. Kind of like yogurt in a tube.
I like it.
It was a great start from yahoo.. and they are buzzing right ahead.. ! I am a fan of yahoo buzz now! quite late but yes! .theya re good
Wonderful product from Y!
This is great news for smaller publishers and people who would want to taste the traffic