Yahoo! Branch out into Social News

Yahoo! have announced plans to launch Yahoo! Buzz - a social news site in the same vein as Digg and Reddit. The news comes as Yahoo! chairperson Jerry Yang attempts to rebuild his business and fend off hostile takeover threats from Microsoft.

Social news allows users to vote on the news stories they would like to see, which helps the site cater to the users’ personal taste. In the case of Yahoo! Buzz, this works by allowing users to send messages to the site while they are surfing the web. They can send these messages by pressing a ‘Buzz button’ at the bottom of a news story, which logs a vote for that particular article. The news articles with the highest number of votes will then be displayed on the Buzz homepage. So far, over a hundred publications have agreed to place Buzz buttons on their websites, including USA today, Newsweek and The Economist.

Although Yahoo! Buzz users will vote for the stories they want to see featured on the homepage, the site’s editorial team will have the final say. This is to avoid indecent, violent or illegal stories being featured on the site, which happened to Digg last year. The site found itself in hot water after the Digg homepage accidentally featured a number of stories that showed users how to overcome specialist software that was designed to stop the copying of HD DVDs.

In another bid to overcome their recent troubles, Yahoo! has also made some updates to its search engine in order to make it as sophisticated as Google. Because of this, users will now find more detail in their search results. This means that results for a restaurant will now take users directly to the reservations page, rather than just the homepage.

Many people will rubbish the launch of Yahoo! Buzz, as it is hardly a new idea. However, with such a strong brand behind this new venture, there’s no doubt that publications will be fighting to get involved, giving this site the potential to be absolutely huge.

Source:

Times