In news that should surprise no one, Yahoo will pull the plug on its ill-fated story-sharing service Buzz this Thursday.
Here’s the official statement:
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
Originally touted as a Digg-like Web aggregator users could submit stories to, Buzz never generated the groundswell Digg did, even after its revamp.
Why so? I’d argue social news sharing services like Digg (and especially Reddit) thrive in part due to the anonymity they’re able to grant users. In other words, you can share whatever you want without having to do so as, you know, you.
With Yahoo Buzz that’s not always the case. Yahoo’s user profile system overlaps with several of its platforms, most notably email, where users tend to conduct their real-life business. In fact, Yahoo Mail is still far and away the most popular email service on the Web, beating even Google’s Gmail (you can see why publicly sharing stories as the “real you” may be less than desirable).
Regardless, for whatever reason, Yahoo’s decided its time to toss Buzz in the trash bin, and I doubt there’ll be too many disappointed by the fact. Back in December, Yahoo announced they were “sunsetting” several other underused services, including AltaVista, Buzz and Yahoo Bookmarks.
(via Tech Crunch)
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