Rumor: Yahoo! to launch Digg competitor

Filed under: Internet, Web services, Yahoo!, Social Software, web 2.0

Rumor: Yahoo! to launch Digg competitor

by Brad Linder Feb 15th 2008

While Yahoo! fields merger/hostile takeover offers, the company's development team continues to push out new services. Today Yahoo! launched a retooled version of its video site. And Valleywag is reporting that the company will be launching a brand spanking new service on February 26th: A news and entertainment page featuring popular stories from around the web.

Yahoo! Buzz as it will reportedly be known will be something of a cross between Digg and Google Trends. Top stories will be chosen through a combination of user votes and popular search results.

But Digg has one thing that Yahoo! Buzz won't. At least not immediately. And that's a list of links from an unlimited number of web pages. Yahoo! Buzz will only feature links to about 100 web publishers at first. Eventually the company will reportedly open Buzz up to the Yahoo! Publisher Network, which means that anyone who sells Yahoo! ads on their site could be featured on Yahoo! Buzz.

While that might sound like a good reason for people to sign up for the publisher network, as incentive to get more social networking traffic, it also means that Yahoo! Buzz is by definition going to be more limited than Digg, StumbleUpon, or other social news and bookmarking sites. But this is all rumor and speculation at this point. It's possible Yahoo! Buzz won't be as limited as Valleywag suggests. Or maybe it's not even real.

If you go to buzz.yahoo.com today you'll find a page with top search results trends. But if Valleywag is correct, that site will be the future home of Yahoo! Buzz.

Tags: buzz, digg, social-bookmarking, social-news, trends, yahoo!-buzz, yahoo-buzz

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Ram said 7:52PM on 2-15-2008

Vallywag is right, the site URL is http://alpha.buzz.yahoo.com
I posted some more screenshots if you want to check.
http://www.teknobites.com/2008/02/15/screenshots-of-yahoo-buzz-news-aggregator/

kingkool68 said 11:17PM on 2-15-2008

Yup, it's real. I've seen it. Expect to see Y! Buzz icons on lots of popular sites after Feb. 26th.

The Tuesday Night Tech Show said 5:24PM on 2-16-2008

Yahoo needs to come up with something on their own, not simply copy another company. I wish Google would just swoop in and take this dumb company out by the knees already.

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