Normally, I'd pooh-pooh any service that claims to be bigger than Digg after only a couple weeks of use, but that appears to be the deal with Yahoo Buzz. And it's such a bummer to me, too, because I finally got the chance to chat a bit with Kevin Rose at the Digg Party at SXSW last week. Just when I feel like the big Digger himself is listening to my suggestions (live bands on Diggnation, live shows from Vancouver, etc.), I feel like Yahoo's trying to pull the rug out from under him, with none of Digg's culture or sense of humor.
A lot of people have heard of a Diggstorm - when a torrent of traffic is suddenly unleashed upon a site due to its inclusion on Digg - and a Buzzstorm, the effects of Yahoo's 200-400M+ users landing on a single site with little advance warning, seems to have devastating effects as well. For a little perspective, check out the graphic above (courtesy of Compete). On a given day, it's possible that a Buzzstorm could be 5-6x as strong as a Diggstorm, not accounting for day-to-day variances.
Yahoo's Buzz algorithm seems to be a bit more varied in its sources than Digg's, and it includes:
- User votes
- Search result tallies
- Number of times a story is emailed out from Buzz
- Some other weird hocus-pocus that will doubtlessly be debated ad nauseum in the blogosphere
Don't get me wrong, I plan on checking out the Buzz, to periodically assess it's value, but if you see me walking down the street looking into my iPhone, I'm on Digg, where people know me better as DryCleaningRulz.
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