Yahoo! Launches Buzz, a Digg Competitor
Even with talks of a potential buy out from Microsoft and it's imminent demise circulating Yahoo! is continuing to roll out new services and update its products at an almost frantic pace. The company has opened up its search services to third party developers, updated it's corporate focused Zimbra mail server platform, launched a live webcam site, updated it's Yahoo! Video service, picked up the rights to the FoxyTunes Firefox extension, and launched or updated a host of mobile initiatives, including a developer platform, a new version of its Yahoo! Go service, and OneConnect which allows you to see which of your Yahoo! contacts is near by.
Now Yahoo! is entering the social news aggregation field dominated by Digg. Yahoo!'s prominence may help its new news voting service 'Digg' out a niche for itself, but the social news arena is a crowded one. In addition to the powerful Digg, which can bring a site to its knees with traffic if one of its stories makes it to the front page, there is the whimsical Stumble Upon which is like hitting shuffle on the Internet, the Wired owned Reddit, the news and politics focused NewsVine, the AOL-Netscape powered Propeller, and many smaller competitors.
Yahoo! Buzz is not with out its unique features however. In addition to user votes, Buzz will incorporate Yahoo! search traffic. The more people search for a topic, the more buzz it will generate. Yahoo has also partnered with several large publishers such as Esquire, the New York Times, and the Economist to place Buzzed stories on the Yahoo! home portal.
Only time will tell if Yahoo! Buzz can find its place in this crowded market, or if the company is wasting its time and energy, but the integration with the Yahoo! portal gives it a big leg up on other competitors.
From The New York Times
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