Yahoo Buzz Launches: Popular Stories To Go On Yahoo Homepage

Yahoo (YHOO) launched the much anticipated Yahoo Buzz Monday night - a Digg-like site that takes stories from pre-approved news publishers (100 to start) and let’s users vote on stories and push them up to the top of the page.

To see it in action, click on the buzz button at the end of this, or any, of our posts (update: button functionality won’t be live until Tuesday). Like Digg, the more users that vote for a story, via the embedded button or on the Buzz site, the higher the story goes on Buzz. But user voting isn’t the only factor in how well stories do. Yahoo is also looking at their search engine logs in real time to determine hot or breaking news. Stories on that topic will get an extra boost in the rankings.

But there’s another part of Buzz that will get publishers excited - every day a few of the most popular stories will also be featured on the Yahoo home page. Yahoo has been experimenting with linking to third party news directly from their home page since last year. In one case, the Buzz team told me, 2 million visitors were sent to Wired for a linked article in the two hours it was on the Yahoo home page. 2-3 stories from Buzz will go on the Yahoo home page daily.

Buzz has categories including entertainment, world news, U.S. news, sports, business, health, and travel. Images and video are also separate categories.

Of course, many publishers won’t be able to handle that kind of traffic flow. But Yahoo is also prepared for that. Smaller sites will only be linked on a fraction of the total home page views - in effect, Yahoo is turning down the firehose for those that can’t handle it.

Yahoo isn’t the first large company to try out the Digg model. In mid 2006 AOL relaunched the Netscape portal as a Digg-like site. AOL eventually moved the service to a different domain name and renamed it Propeller. The service has about 3.8 million monthly unique visitors (Comscore), compared to about 12.5 million for Digg.

Comments

[Arthuro:]

Lets see, Yahoo’s new approaches that are screwed up (but at least they look cool):

TV - Unusable format -quadruples 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News - Outdated or non-timely information, some haven’t been updated for weeks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 with 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 and rampant with spam
Yahoo sport - Terrible format & dated information

My Yahoo Beta - Now an unusable format. I will be gone once it comes out of Beta and is forced on us

and now Buzz…

In the American tradition of form over function… and change for change sake, thank god for Goggle or we’d really be progressing to the stone age. As a systems engineer myself, I know the first lesson of version changes is to not lose user functionality.

From an original YAHOO user with 80% of my time on the web spent at their site, I’m now down to <30% ans with the new Buzz format it will be less. By mid-year I will have completely migrated to Google. I can't believe their doing what your doing.

2008 Feb 26 08:23 AM

[grammar_nazi:]

"Let's" is short for "let us". So to rephrase the author, "... takes stories from pre-approved news publishers (100 to start) and let us users vote on stories...".

Atrocious apostrophe abuse.

2008 Feb 26 11:21 PM

[karunakaran:]

 Dear friends ,
 Please go through the Blog and open all the advertisements and click and gain knowledge. On each click you reach the peak of knowledge.
 Thanks

 karunakaraninfo.blogsp.../

Friend::akarunakaran@l... to gain more friends of your Nature.

2008 May 10 07:28 AM