Webware

Updated at 11:50 am on 9/16/08 to clarify the role of Blueprint.

Yahoo isn't wasting time advertising Blueprint, the seasoned mobile development platform that received renewed attentions in San Francisco last week at CTIA 2008. On Tuesday, the company released the most recent fruit of Blueprint's labor, a widget for the mobile application Yahoo Go (review) that peddles Yahoo Buzz, its Digg-like social news service.

From the Yahoo Buzz widget, social newshounds can access a summary of top stories voted on in the previous twelve hours by Yahoo users' popular vote. They'll click for a list of headlines, click again for an image and the low-down, and click a third time to follow links to a mobile browser page with the full story.

While the Buzz widget may have been developed on Blueprint, most users will be more interested in the widget as an alternate news source on Yahoo Go that will rival third-party news widgets and Yahoo's own mainstream and entertainment feeds.

The mobile application Yahoo Go primarily serves as Yahoo's hub for the rainbow of its services--e-mail, headline and sports news, Flickr, weather, maps, and search--though Yahoo has made efforts to open content to outside publishers by inviting developers to create a widgets gallery and by furthermore inviting mobile users to add RSS widgets of their favorite sites. There are some respectable widgets in the public gallery, including Wikipedia, eBay, MTV News, and social networks Facebook and MySpace; however, the gallery is a mere thumbprint by Facebook and iPhone app standards.

You can add the Yahoo Buzz widget to Yahoo Go by searching the widget gallery from within the app or by browsing the Yahoo category. iPhone users can also access Buzz from an optimized site independent of Yahoo Go, not yet a native iPhone app.

Yahoo's Digg-a-like Buzz is opening up to the world tonight. Until now, while anyone could see stories that had been Buzzed and vote them up or down, only about 400 publishers could contribute new links to the service.

A Yahoo spokesperson confirmed that it was always Yahoo's intention to open up Buzz, but that it kept the service restricted while it worked out bugs and refined the product. One might wonder what is so hard about building a site for submitting and rating products. There are tons out there. Yahoo made things a bit more difficult for itself by setting a unique goal for Buzz: it's designed to feed stories to the Yahoo home page. And unlike pure community vote sites like Digg and Reddit, Buzz's algorithms also take into account search engine popularity. (Yahoo's editors still program the Yahoo.com front page manually; Buzz is a feeder system.)

Want some Yahoo juice?

Buzz also can leverage other Yahoo communities. Delicious, Flickr, and Upcoming could get prominent Buzz links to feed items into the system. That won't appear initially, but links the other way will: When you buzz something, you'll also be able to share it on Delicious, or on Digg, StumbleUpon, or other services.

It's tempting to discount Buzz as just another content voting site, but that misses the point. Publishers (like Webware publisher CNET) cannot afford to ignore Buzz, since popular stories on the service can get placement on the Yahoo page, and that could drive large amounts of traffic back. It's a big carrot. Competition for Buzz votes is going to be strong.

I'm still hoping Google buys Digg. That would make things really interesting.

Buzz starts rolling out at 7 p.m PDT Monday. It may take some time for the new features to hit all the company's servers, I was told.

Propeller, AOL's social-news site that's never really managed to catch on, has a brand new look Tuesday. It's the third major rehaul since the service was launched as Netscape.com in mid-2006. Gone are the drab blacks, greens, and oranges from the Netscape.com days along with the teeny, tiny text that made me reach for the Ctrl+ shortcut in my browser. In its place is a more retro scheme with vibrant colors and a banana-shaped mustached mascot.

That's not the biggest change though. The old voting system that mimicked Digg's one vote per user model has been turned on its head with a new one that ranks stories on a scale from 1 to 10 with some of the hottest stories getting play on the front page of Netscape (formerly Propeller.com's domain) and eventually AOL.com.

Propeller's new look is retro--to the max. (Click to enlarge.)

(Credit: CNET Networks)

The new scoring system is actually a hybrid of any story's play within the Propeller community, combining user votes (called "props") with clicks, user comments, and overall voting velocity. My guess is that while more transparent, this new system won't make a whole lot of sense to people who want to click on a voting button and see a noticeable change. At the moment, coming to the front door of Propeller yields an entire page of stories ranked 10. Newbie users who have come to expect a more standard ranking system on services like Reddit and Digg will be scratching their heads to find the good stuff.

Other changes that are bound to confuse users are the new commenting system and upcoming stories queue.

The comment system throws in a somewhat befuddling five-star ranking system that includes a karma tracker, along with two different ways to expand and contract comment threads to save space. For longer threads you'll have to expand the conversation 25 comments at a time, making it beneficial to jack someone else's thread if only to get higher screen presence.

Likewise, the upcoming stories queue called "Just In" is simply overwhelming. It houses upcoming stories in a similar fashion to Digg Spy, however you can't pause the stream to dig through it, or sort out what types of site activity you want to filter out. In perusing links, simply scrolling down the page made me lose track of a story I was going to come back to. With more users, that same story could fly right off the page.

There is light at the end of the tunnel for Propeller, and that light is groups, a feature that lets people submit and watch stories by interest just like the groups functionality found on FriendFeed. Each user can only create one group (ever), but can join as many as they'd like, something that's bound to change as the service adapts. For now you can browse through a directory of groups and contribute links and discussion once you've joined up.

Propeller still has one huge weapon on its side and that's two pages that get a lot of traffic (Netscape and AOL.com). These can be leveraged to promote some of Propeller's group activity and story promotion. As we've seen with Yahoo's Buzz community, smart leveraging makes people and publishers want to use your tool. In the case of Propeller, we just haven't seen that same system take off. (Pardon the pun.)

This post was updated at 11:18 AM PT to correct the date of the announcement.

Yahoo announced Thursday that it has made some minor upgrades to Buzz, the social news service that it launched in February.

Most notably, the company has released a "Top Buzz" widget that site and blog owners can embed in their Web sites, displaying the top articles in Yahoo Buzz or those from a specific Buzz category. There are also now RSS feeds for stories submitted to Buzz as well as each of its categories, and "First Buzzed By" indicators much like the "Submitted By" taglines on competitor Digg.

Yahoo Buzz remains in a beta test phase, but the company says it's growing fast despite major congestion in the social news and meme-tracking market. New publishers continue to roll into the program, and Yahoo has a perk that even Digg can't offer: placement on the Yahoo front page for heavily "buzzed" stories. That'll get you a lot of eyes.

Yahoo Buzz, the Internet-meme-tracker-meets-social-news site we wrote about a few weeks back has finally gone live and is open to everyone. The service tracks popular content around the Web by mixing user searches with voting to promote stories to the front page.

As an added incentive to get on the site, Yahoo's taking a handful of the most popular stories from Buzz and putting them on the front page of Yahoo.com, a move that will send a lot of traffic to smaller sites where the content is being hosted.

While the service seems to lack some of the community hooks other social news services like Digg and Reddit offer, Buzz has an ace up its sleeve by providing related stories, which for the most part are pretty spot-on. This makes for a much more engaging content discovery experience, and something that's going to provide more clicks to stories that aren't making the front page.

The top of Buzz's page is a series of thumbnails taken from popular stories on the site.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Vote for stories, although you can only go up, not down.

What's already quite strange about the service is the lack of user involvement that's been put in by design. While on the surface it appears as a social news site, there's no commenting system or any way to share what you've voted on with others. Unlike Netscape's Propeller, which did its best to emulate Digg, Buzz can continue to operate without human intervention. Speaking of which, there's no real upcoming section per se. You can locate stories with less buzz and promote them, but a certain amount of buzz is already given to stories that have been given some search love, making users dig deeper to reach the smaller stories.

If Yahoo was looking to take a chunk out of social news space, Buzz doesn't seem to be the answer. While the site is useful, Buzz is actually competing with sites like TechMeme, NewsPond, Spotplex, and Blogrunner when it comes to tracking the newest and most popular stories. In many ways Buzz is simply a reimagined front page for Yahoo.com, something that's self-maintaining and can be edited (albeit only upwards) by the masses.

Lately it seems that Friday is the new day for Yahoo news around here. Apple's got Tuesday mornings locked, and Microsoft prefers 3 a.m., so the Web giant seems to have decided to go for the day when everyone's half-checked out of the office. Earlier today we looked at the new face of Yahoo Video, and about the same time Valleywag got the scoop on a new Yahoo service called "Buzz" that's set to launch later this month.

So what is it? It's a buzz tracker for news items picked not only by user voting (like Digg, Propeller, Reddit, et al), but also for items people are searching for both on Yahoo and on the company's publisher network. According to Valleywag, the service is opening up small, about 100 or so publishers until the Summer (that is if Microsoft doesn't kill it off if the acquisition goes through) before making it available to all the sites.

We contacted Yahoo for more information on the service. Yahoo spokeswoman Kelley Podboy told us:

Yahoo! Buzz is part of a new initiative we are testing to surface interesting content from around the Web. We will be sharing more details of the initiative in the coming weeks. Ongoing product innovation is important to Yahoo! And we continue to test various products and services to gain valuable feedback and insights from our users.

According to Valleywag, the release date is set for February 26th, which falls on a Tuesday. There are also screenshots of the service in action here and here.

It should be noted Yahoo has maintained the buzz.yahoo.com domain since late 2005 when it started "The Buzz Blog" a companion to Yahoo's Buzz Index which is a daily tracker the likes of Google's Yearly Zeitgeist. The service helped track hot searches like music on the Billboard Charts. The new system would simply combine this with user voting and sourcing searches from smaller sites.