Yahoo! tells Digg and Reddit to Buzz off

Davey Winder
Wednesday, 20 August 2008 18:53

Your IT - Home IT

It has taken Yahoo! six months to recruit, it claims, 5 million users for the Buzz social news service which has now finally opened its doors to all comers for the first time. Should Digg and Reddit be worried?

It was back in February when Yahoo! took the interesting step of announcing it was going to start playing with the big boys of social news aggregation, taking on the likes of Digg and Reddit with its new Buzz service.

Starting off with 100 or so web publishing partners, that has grown to some 400 sites whose content can be quickly Buzzed Up the recommended news pages. In just six months of closed testing, the user figures have jumped just as impressively.

Yahoo! is now claiming that Buzz has some 5 million users, all discovering, voting upon and sharing content.

Of course, Digg and Reddit can claim the high ground here having well and truly established themselves as the brands to beat in this particular game. It's not as if Buzz does anything different after all. So why should Digg and Reddit be worried?

The answer is a simple one: reach. Yahoo! can wrap its arms around the web like few others, and the benefits of getting a story Buzzed up onto the Yahoo front page is surely one that can be described as tempting to potential publishing partners to say the least.

The fact that sites such as Salon.com and GigaOm which took part in the closed testing during the last six months have reportedly seen an immediate impact upon traffic which is said to have 'soared' when content climbed the Buzz ladder has got to be good news for everyone else.

Now that any site can participate, not just the chosen few hundred, the benefits of increased traffic will start to pull them in like flies to, err, well maybe that's not the best analogy. That said, certain aspects of the social news service do smell a little odd.

So should Digg and Reddit be worried by Buzz, and just how does a story get to that coveted position on the Yahoo front page? All is not as straightforward as you might imagine. Find out why on page 2...

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