San Francisco — Yahoo Inc. this week announced that it has introduced a bunch of new social attributes to the beta version of its Yahoo Buzz social news site, which lets people spotlight and find interesting news stories and blog posts based on user votes and search patterns, is now getting a piece of the “Yahoo Open Strategy” action with the new Yahoo universal profiles that makes it look even more similar to Digg.
A new Updates portion on Yahoo Buzz site now lets users to more easily discover content their friends have Buzzed, Yahoo said. Additionally, people can share a personalized Buzz page that shows activity such as what sites they have buzzed, and Yahoo has also added a commenting system relatively similar to that of Digg, which lets users reply to and provide a thumbs up or thumbs down to the comments of other users, along with threaded replies.
If you have already created a contact list on Yahoo, you will now able to see the stories that those people are buzzing up in a new “Y! Updates” section on the Buzz homepage. Simply clicking on user’s avatar or name allows you click through to their profiles, where you can then advance to see their full Yahoo profile.
“Yahoo is totally committed to creating the most pertinent experience by enabling social interactions inside and outside of Yahoo’s network,” the company said in a statement.
Yahoo first introduced Buzz in February, prompting many industry observers to call it a “Digg clone.” The site was initially available to selected users before it was opened to all publishers in August.
These new features are interesting for a couple reasons. The update expands on the Yahoo Open Strategy -– users of Buzz in effect become users of Yahoo’s new universal profile, specifically aimed at opening all Yahoo platforms and data to third parties, helping create a huge social network behind the scenes.
The latest version of Yahoo Messenger, still in beta testing, also can show what a person’s social associates are buzzing and other activity that is shared through the Yahoo Open Strategy.
Additionally, it is starting to become increasingly apparent that Yahoo Buzz is going to keep adding the same features as Digg, as it did when it launched its “Up & Coming” section a couple months back.
Adam Ostrow, a blogger at Mashable, noted that the updates make Buzz look even more like Digg, but with Yahoo’s more mainstream user base in mind.
Yahoo Buzz, he added, appears to be a bright spot for the flailing Internet Company, which just shut down its Yahoo Live experiment earlier this week, and has been put in a shaky position later in the week after Google Inc. walked away from a proposed advertising deal between the two. Since Google’s announcement, Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang said a takeover by Microsoft Corp. might be the best thing for the company.