Hans Across The Interwebs

The big buzz on the web for the past week has been Yahoo’s Digg Killer, aptly named Buzz. This news site – launched on february 25th - caught everyone unawares by suddenly launching droves and droves of traffic all over the web, impressing even the most unimpressable of bloggers, Techcrunch’s Mike Arrington: “it’s clear that a link from Yahoo.com blows away anything Digg or any other competitor can offer.”, said Arrington.

Salon.com and the Huffinton Post, to name a few, reported significant traffic increases in the many hundreds of thousands.

No Revolution here?

But Yahoo Buzz is no social news revolution, and it’s not bringing the Digg concept to the masses as some would have us believe.

Don’t think you’ll be posting your next blog post (probably something like “10 things to think about during a boring subway ride while picking your nose”) on Yahoo’s Buzz anytime soon: it is invite only. The stories therefore necessarily only come from bigger, more mainstream sites. And that leaves nothing but a watered down, castrated version of Digg, a digg.

That’s not to say this thing isn’t big, but Yahoo was always getting lots of traffic. Once they decided to point more links outward, any model they chose was going to creat massive amounts of traffic. As does Buzz.

Meanwhile, Microsoft still wants to buy Yahoo; Yahoo still doesn’t want to get bought but is in talks with Microsoft anyway; and Yahoo is trying to bring up its price by stating they will grow 73 percent in revenues in the next three years. They failed to indicate why they’d be able to do in the next three years what they were unable to do in the past three years. Maybe it’ll be through Yahoo Buzz.

I do know one thing: I just can’t wait for Buzz to get really big, so someone to think of a next generation app to replace it: The Buzz Killer! (ahem)

So what do you think about this Buzz thing?