Yahoo officialy launch Buzz

After about six months of testing Buzz, Yahoo’s news aggregator service, is finally open for every one.

During the these first six months users were able to only vote for content provided by only 400 publishers, but now they will be able to submit further suggestions and if a link gets enough votes, it will appear on the front page of Yahoo.

The concept of Buzz is very similar to Digg, the popular social networking site, as in both cases users can submit links which are then subject to voting, but there are fundamental differences.

For example Yahoo Buzz mixes the users’ votes with the the performing on the search engine in order to generate the ranking. Beside, and as the biggest and most important difference, the links with the highest ranks will appear on the Yahoo home page; sites that participated to the beta, and they benefited of this feature, claimed that they received a very good burst of visits.

Webmasters also have the chance to add a button to their articles so the readers can easily vote for them. Buzz is offering the code for these buttons on a section of the site.

Even during the beta Buzz become quite popular; for example it surpassed Digg in terms of unique users in April.

Links

Yahoo Buzz: http://buzz.yahoo.com/.