Buzz Up or Buzz Off?

Posted by keirsun on February 27, 2008 at 2:39 PM

The Yahoo! hive is abuzz this week with the launch of its social news service, Yahoo! Buzz.

While Yahoo! touts the site as a "brand new social experience that unites people with the most remarkable and timely content from websites across the Internet," the experience itself feels similar to Digg, Propeller and the entire ecosystem of online news sharing sites. Buzz users can vote for or against (buzz up or buzz down) a specific news article, video, photo, etc. to express their like or dislike of the content.

Yahoo! says what makes the service unique is a ranking system called the Buzz Score. The factors that affect an item's Buzz Score include:

• Number of votes received on Yahoo! Buzz
• Popularity of related searches on Yahoo! Search
• How many times content is shared via email

The big selling point for publishers is that content with a top Buzz Score may be featured on the Yahoo! homepage. But it's unclear whether this content gets a honeycomb of its own on Yahoo.com or just gets thrown into the sticky mix of content on the Yahoo! homepage.

Another benefit to Buzz publishers: it's easy to post an item found on Yahoo! Buzz to another social site such as Digg, Delicious, Facebook, etc. via the Post drop-down menu under each item. While Buzz beta testing continues, a limited number of publishers are currently allowed to contribute Buzz content. But you can sign up to be considered as a future Buzz publisher.

It may have something to do with my editor's eye spotting grammatical errors in the Buzz Help section, but it almost feels as though Yahoo! Buzz was a rush job. But since Yahoo! Buzz is currently in beta, I can understand there being a few holes in the hive here and there. I guess it's time to take advantage of Yahoo's requests for Buzz feedback.