Social bookmarking now has a new player, at least for the general public it is a new player. Yahoo! Buzz has been closed to all but a select few; now it is open to all. I have read reports that it is limited to the US, however nothing in their TOS or pages seem to indicate this.
What is Buzz. Really it is just another bookmarking site, similar to Digg, Sphinn and many others. You can get a widget to put on your site that has vote buttons and vote counts. It is still fairly rudimentary in comparison to the others. You have to manually enter the page’s URL every time you include the widget.
Where Buzz is a little different is in the traffic that may generate from popular articles. According to Yahoo!, top stories ‘may’ be featured on the Yahoo.com home page. Whilst Google may be the number one search engine, Yahoo.com still ranks as the number one site for traffic. Having your story featured there could potentially lead to millions of viewers – I hope your site is prepared for it when it happens.
You will need to have a Yahoo! account to use Buzz, however, in this day and age nearly everyone has one, even if it’s been sitting the corner gathering dust for a few years. Will Buzz help with your social bookmarking? Time will tell. It will depend on what sort of user interaction there is and whether or not is gets abused like many of the other sites. The rewards for artificially inflating a Buzz rank could be huge.
It will be interesting to see if individuals set themselves up as Buzz voters (setting up several hundred artificial accounts) as they do with StumbleUpon and then offer to vote up your content, for a price! Yahoo! Buzz is certainly worth checking out.
