Finally, Yahoo has taken the beta-wrapping off and announced their new social bookmarking/news service Yahoo Buzz. Given all the pink slips lately over at Yahoo! I am surprised and pleased they are still able to get products out the door.
Buzz is much like social bookmarking site Digg, allowing users to submit content, to be voted up or down by the user base(Buzzed in this case). The service allows you to syndicate your submission across other bookmarking sites and is promising that popular content will be passed along to Yahoo! editors to be pushed along to the Yahoo homepage. Enticing both Average Joes and SEOs to use the service to expose themselves to Yahoo.com’s enormous traffic.
Yahoo is doing some unique things, users submitting content will be pre-approved and ranked, and the Buzz ranking is mashed with search trends. Techmeme meets Digg + Yahoo.com front page incentive. This could get interesting.
What’s perplexing to me is why not harness the power of Del.icio.us to power and influence Buzz in a more transparent manner. The Del.icio.us user base has proven to be a dedicated and savvy bunch. Their tech niche slant may be the reason for Yahoo’s reluctance to push to Del.icio.us to the fore front. Making Del.icio.us main stream could alienate current users of the service and may slant the Buzz service to become tech centric and therefore unmarketable on the Yahoo.com homepage.
There is however, the ability to create crossover benefits between the two services.
- Auto bookmarking for Buzz users to their del.icio.us accounts
- Meta-tag information from delicious can be used to enhance buzz results.
- Buzz front page content customization based upon del.icio.us account history
- The ability to create a social network “Buzz” index metric for ad services. (Empirical Viral Measurement anyone?)
Buzz is the new kid, let see if it finds it’s niche or revolutionizes the market.
