Yahoo has announced that it will shut down its Buzz service later this week. The service was an attempt to rival news aggregators with voting algorithms, such as Digg and Reddit.
There was a time when Yahoo Buzz could drive a huge amount of traffic (more than all the major alternatives combined), since stories were featured on the front page of Yahoo.com, which is still one of the most trafficked websites on the Internet. Unfortunately for the web giant, Buzz just could not keep up with the competition.
While we all know that Facebook and Twitter are very useful for sharing news, there are really only two other communities left for sharing links. The first is Reddit, which saw its traffic more than triple in 2010. The second is StumbleUpon, which last month passed 1 billion monthly page views.
Yahoo Buzz launched on February 26, 2008. The service allowed Yahoo users to share updates such as when they've uploaded photos, changed their status, buzzed up a news story, or posted a new restaurant review. Much like Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Facebook, and Twitter, there was a Buzz Up button that webmasters could add to their websites. Many large websites decided to give it a shot, but the button did not catch on in the long run.
Yahoo! Buzz will be discontinued as of April 21, 2011. As of this date, you will be unable to access the Yahoo! Buzz site. This was a hard decision. However this will help us focus on our core strengths and new innovations.We appreciate your patronage.The Yahoo! Buzz Team
In December 2010, there were reports that Yahoo was shutting down several of its Web properties. Yahoo confirmed at that point that it would shut down Yahoo Buzz, but the company did not provide a timeline. Now we know: it will be gone on Thursday.
Comments
Post a Comment