Beat the Buzzer

Posted on February 27, 2008

Yahoo’s newest beta project is Buzz, a weak attempt to capitalize on the (now dated) 2.0 mania, which gives you an opportunity to vote on news items and lets the readers determine what is the most popular.

..a pretty uninteresting concept right now unless they find a way to do value added. This concept seems to have been the right thing to have been the predecessor to Digg, but I’m not following how it’s valid years after its already been done, especially with one huge, glaring difference. With sites like Digg, I get a chance to suggest the stories. With Buzz, I can only vote on what Yahoo has fed to me.

Things like this help you understand why so many projects like to label themselves beta. If a project sinks we’ll write it off with the disclaimer — ‘it was only in beta anyway’.

This one may stay around but don’t look for it to have much life. It’s not going to raise Microsoft’s bid price, that’s for sure.