New Version of Yahoo Buzz to Compete with Digg?

According to Techcrunch, Yahoo will be launching their Yahoo Buzz service sometime on Monday. Techcrunch have said that they will be making an announcement at 9 pm on Monday, which leads me to believe that the re-launched site will be made available to the public at that time.

Right now, Yahoo Buzz is kind of like Google Trends in a blog format. On the right side of the page, they have a widget that shows the user what the top movers are as of right now. Meaning, which search terms have shown the greatest increase in traffic over a certain time period.

The Yahoo Buzz team have also applied this data to current events that are of interest to the user. For instance, they have a current blog posting (not going to link to it because the link will probably be dead by tomorrow) which ranks the major categories at the Academy Awards based on total number of searches by Yahoo users. So, "Juno" is leading the way in the best picture category because it has been searched for the most.

This is an interesting site, but Yahoo has decided to re-launch and make it more of a Digg-like site.

According to Techcrunch, the new Yahoo Buzz! will be a destination site where users rank the best stories and videos. Instead of choosing to "Digg" it, you will "Buzz" it. It appears as though the site will incorporate some of the features of the old Buzz site (top searches for the day, etc.), but will mainly be a Digg clone now.

The downside to this - there are many Digg clones out there, and no one has come close to duplicating the success of Digg. The upside - Yahoo will be able to drive massive amounts of traffic to this new initiative if they choose to.

Will this be another failure for Yahoo? We'll soon find out. I can guarantee you that as soon as the new Yahoo Buzz! launches, there will be people looking to game the system. I hope that Yahoo has all of their I's dotted and T's crossed when it comes to the algorithm behind the program or else it could turn out to be an embarrassing mess for the company.

Source: Techcrunch

Yahoo Buzz

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