Yahoo Buzz opens up to everyone

When Yahoo’s Digg-like social news site Buzz first debuted earlier this year, the company opted to run the service in a rather restricted manner taking stories only from about a few hundred pre-approved news publishers. Finally six months after its launch, however, it appears that Yahoo Buzz is officially ready for business with the submission process now open to the public at large.

Despite being fairly new to the social news scene, Yahoo Buzz has a significant advantage over its competitors which is that popular stories on the service can get placement on the Yahoo page itself, and the traffic-related possibilities of this simply can’t be ignored by publishers.

Yahoo also differentiates the service by keeping some editorial control over what makes it to the top, in order to present the news based not only on popularity but also on quality – all while preventing mischievous users from gaming the system. Whether this quality-driven focus will change once there's a massive influx of content submitted to Buzz now that it’s open, remains to be seen.