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"Yes, yes, I'm taking the easy route by directly comparing Yahoo Buzz to Digg. Mark wrote about Buzz earlier today, but I feel I had to drop in with my two cents, because, well, I expected more. \nThe similarities between Yahoo Buzz and Digg are obvious, although Yahoo Buzz takes some ideas from memetrackers such as Techmeme. By giving users (those who have signed in with their Yahoo ID) the ability to vote for stories, but at the same time calculating a story's popularity based on searches, emails and other factors, Yahoo is trying to deliver the best of both worlds. \nThey got the simplicity of use and the design right, at least for the casual user. The site displays recently popular stories in a neat animation at the top, and the rest of the site is easy to use and nice enough to look at. For some reason, some of the categories are in a drop down menu (Sci/tech, for example), which is slightly annoying but nothing that can't be forgiven. Content-wise, it's important to note that some buzzed stories will appear on the Yahoo home page, which should put Digg's traffic surge and the fabled Digg effect to shame. \nHowever, believe it or not, this is absolutely everything I can tell you about Yahoo Buzz. That's it. There's not upcoming section, no fancy tools to see how the stories become popular, no API (they are planning it, though) for developers to create third party applications... In fact, any Pligg site has way more options and features than Yahoo Buzz, and even notoriously featureless Techmeme has several different views (font size, threads open/closed). One could argue that Yahoo Buzz aims for absolute simplicity, but I'm not buying it. Digg's interface is even cleaner and even simpler in some regards, and yet it offers a myriad of options and features, let alone dozens of third party applications. \n\nFlashy front page, but there's nothing behind the facade. \nAll in all, I'm afraid that Buzz is just Yahoo catching up with the times; there's little innovation or novelty here. Long time fans of Yahoo services (there is such a thing, right?) will appreciate the fact that they can sign in with their Yahoo ID, and some will like the simplicity of the interface. Other than that, it's move along, nothing to see here. \nOn a general note, it's really fascinating to watch all these humongous sites and companies not being able to replicate or match the functionality of smaller startups. Given the resources that a company like Microsoft, Yahoo or AOL has, one would say that their Digg clones (Yahoo Buzz, Propeller) or their Netvibes/Pageflakes clones (My.Yahoo, My.Netscape) should blow the competition out of the water, and yet they disappoint us more often than not. It seems that Google is the only giant out there who's able to get it right; I wonder how much that fairy tale is going to last."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2008/02/25/yahoo-buzz-digg/>