Yahoo Buzz is being discontinued.
The company announced on the Buzz site on Monday that it was a “hard decision” while adding, “however this will help us focus on our core strengths and new innovations.”
The company will allow the product to run through April 21, providing customers with enough time to remove Yahoo Buzz buttons from their web properties.
Buzz was a success during it’s early launch in February 2008, overtaking Digg in May 2008 according to comScore reports, however the aggregator quickly lost market share to social media sharing on Facebook and Twitter, while sites such as Digg and in a larger way Reddit continued to build stronger products while Buzz continued on a rather stagnant non-innovation path.
Personally I was never a fan of the platform, Yahoo appeared in many cases to push their own networks content to the top of popular pages by muddling up what was actually user voted content and what content was placed on the site by Yahoo editorial staff. At it’s core the system favored Yahoo editorial choices and not those stories voted by users which took away from the social aspect of the program.Throw in the near copycat type voting system Buzz implemented at a time when Digg and Reddit were clearly dominating the market and it seems that users quickly drifted back to platforms which worked in the same way and which they were more familiar with. Sites such as Reddit to this day still have a very “Indy” feel to them, allowing any site to gather an audience if their content is deemed worthy by site members with less favoritism than what was offered by Yahoo Buzz.
In any case, the program will be gone in a few short days so feel free to leave your thoughts about the programs departure in our comments section.
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Yahoo has been mismanaged for so long it can not help but become a ghost of its former self. Yahoo is largely irrelevant. Sad really, but predictable given Yang’sand his successors’ hubris and lack of insight.
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I’m getting fed up with Yahoo. I haven’t used my Yahoo web mail account for over ten years due to the level of spam it kept getting. Even all these years later it’s still getting flogged with spam every day. The only Yahoo thing I still use is Flickr. I pay for my account on Flickr, $25 once a year. This year due to Yahoo dumping deliciious and other of it’s services I contacted them, looking for some guarantee before I sunk money into Flickr again.
After six emails back and forth, I did not get an answer, I just gave up on trying. What a load of morons or maybe just really crafty marketers/ politicians. From what I am left with it seems they do not guarantee a thing and you won’t get your money back if they suddenly decide Flickr is a “hard decision” they need to make so they can “focus on our core strengths and new innovations”.
I think they’re sinking fast. Or just don’t really know what they are doing any more. They buy one service and then sell it. Then dump a bunch of services people are actually using. There is no way you can trust anything about Yahoo. I did pay for another year of Flickr but I’m using it to look around for another place to move my Flickr photo groups too. I don’t want to lose contact with the people I have met there. That was the real reason I kept the account. I can find other places to store my photos. It is the social groups that are the real value to me. But, I’ve lost my faith that Yahoo values the people (like myself) who support it.