What’s all the “Buzz” about?
So I’ve been playing around with Yahoo’s Buzz a bit and so far I’m not impressed. According to the site, “Yahoo! Buzz features the most popular stories right now, determined by people around the Web. A story’s Buzz Score is based on your votes, searches, emails, and more.” But confusing UI, ambiguity around how stories appear and a few too many Yahoo News stories has Buzz feeling rather blah.
Here are a couple glaring problems with the service:
First off, it feels more like a Google News than a Digg. But that’s a good thing right? Not when your top sports story is a satirical blog post titled, “AWOL Garnett Captured in China.” I’m not a big NBA fan and immediately clicked on the headline believing it to be real. Buzz needs to figure out it’s identity and embrace it so future readers are not duped by these types of stories.
Secondly, and I’m picking a bit on the sports section here, 8 of the top 10 stories in sports right now comes from Yahoo News. I’m all for self-promotion, but are 80% of the “most popular stories” in sports only on Yahoo? I doubt it.
There also seems to be some oddness around how stories become buzz-worthy. The number 1 story in Lifestyle is “Beefy Tortilla Soup is great for busy nights” yet it has no votes. I’m confused.
So far Buzz doesn’t deserve the buzz it’s received from the web.
