Despite its lack of success against the giant in the search engine field, Yahoo seems to understand Web 2.0 better than Google. Its newest service, Yahoo Buzz, accepts input and votes from users. Is it merely a clone of Digg, or something more?
On the face of it, Yahoo Buzz seems very much to be a Digg clone in the way it’s supposed to work. It asks users to vote on the news stories they like. Content that gets lots of votes will then be featured on its front page.
In other ways, Buzz is different from Digg. It isn’t based solely on user votes. As Yahoo explains, “A story is ranked based on its Buzz Score. The score is derived from search term popularity, the number of times a story is emailed from Buzz, and the number of votes a story receives.” This is probably a more realistic measure of the popularity of an article than simply totaling votes. With three different metrics, it may suffer less from user attempts to game the system.
Digg and similar sites often suffer from this problem. The news media covering social sites reports regularly on user attempts on Digg to push various stories to the top – or bury them. There’s even supposed to be an informal group of users called the “Bury Brigade” that tries to keep inappropriate or spammy stories from seeing the light of day for very long.
In addition to using more than one metric, Yahoo Buzz uses human editors, not computer programs, to decide when an item has received enough “buzz” to go on its front page. Sure, it can be exciting to make it to the front page of sites such as Digg or Slashdot, but even those social sites don’t see Yahoo’s level of traffic. Yes, it’s only the second-most-popular search engine, but Yahoo’s front page still receives 90 million visitors every month – and that’s from the US alone. Just how fast would Slashdot’s or Digg’s servers melt under that kind of traffic?
To give you an idea of the power and influence to which this translates, let me quote a New York Times article reporting on Yahoo Buzz before it went live. “In a test of the service this year, Yahoo linked from its front page to content from Esquire magazine for just three hours. In that brief period of time, traffic to the Esquire.com site, which already allows users of Digg and Reddit to vote on its stories, doubled for the month.” Look at that again. Traffic doubled for the month – after being linked to Yahoo’s home page for only three hours!
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