Yahoo Buzz is Just Concentrated
March 17, 2008 by Jayvee Fernandez
Filed under Computers
Richard McManus and Michael Arrington both sing praises to Yahoo Buzz, claiming its traffic firehose is potentially stronger than Digg’s thanks to Yahoo’s mainstream audience. I propose that Yahoo Buzz’s firehose seems stronger only because it’s more concentrated.
While you can vote stories up on Buzz, you cannot submit stories. Only Yahoo can do that, from a small pool of invite-only publishers. That focuses all traffic from Buzz on a few selected sites — which will, naturally, come out with big press releases about it. I must praise Yahoo on their PR strategy there.
The real test will come if and when Yahoo Buzz allows users to submit stories. Until then, it just brings higher traffic to sites that already have high traffic. It’s just exposing more mainstream media to its mainstream audience — nothing groundbreaking there, really.
Buzz is nothing more than a fancy repackaging of Yahoo News. The only difference is that users can vote on stories. This is hardly a meaningful difference, and certainly is not deserving of all the ‘buzz’ the site has received.