Do you have a Yahoo! login? I bet you do. Everyone has one. And if you do, you have everything you need in order to participate in Yahoo! Buzz.
I used to be really down on the service, with its exclusivity and the huge hype that led up to its unveiling. But recently, I’ve changed my mind.
In fact, I’m ready to turn 180 degrees. Why? Read on.
This service has been around for a while now, thought it is still in beta at the time of writing. To be honest, its focus is not really aligned with social media at all, it’s designed to go up against the likes of the new Digg, Mixx and Mozilla’s offering, Propeller.
The way it works is fairly familiar if you have used Digg or Mixx before.. to an extent. The front page looks similar to these other voting sites, but how the articles got there is a different story. Yahoo! actually considers several factors when deciding if a story is buzz-worthy.. how many people buzzed it, how many people are using Yahoo! to search for it or similar articles, and how many blogs are linking to it.
In a way, they have managed to fuse many of their back-end applications; yahoo membership, web search, blog search, and link density to come up with a novel way to find popular news of the day.
So why am I starting to like the service? Several reasons:
- Speed: Only certain blogs are chosen to be sources for Y! Buzz (which I don’t necessarily agree with), but if you are reading an article on one that does have buzz support you just click a button buzz something up. Fast and easy.
- Novelty: As I said above, Yahoo! Buzz is only similar to Digg on the surface. But what it is doing is leveraging big Yahoo! properties to bring you what’s hot on the net.
- The Buzz Lottery: For those blogs that are chosen to be included in Y! Buzz, if one of their articles is judged as super-popular, it is seen by millions of people. This has to be a great feeling!
Of course, the blog has to be chosen first. Well, here’s hoping.
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