The website I’ve been working on at work went live on Monday. Yahoo! Buzz pulls in articles from a list of publishers and allows users to vote by “buzzing” them up or down and/or share them with friends via email. Based off those two things as well as how much the article falls in line with what people are searching for using Yahoo Search, we assign a “buzzscore”. The ultimate result is that articles with high scores may end up on Yahoo.com.
I played a very small role in a large team, so there’s not much I can point to and say, “I did that”, but I can say that I’ve learned a ton and been exposed to a level of professionalism and organization which still amazes me on a daily basis.
A key difference for me between this launch and any I’ve ever been involved with is the sheer number of people who visit and what that means as far as reaction.
On AZF2K, we have roughly 5-8 active users and maybe 15 or so unique visitors. We get around 15 page views a day. When I “launch” a new feature, it’s usually more like throwing spaghetti on the wall. Feedback runs from glowing, to teasing, to silence.
Yahoo has 500 million users. Yahoo.com is the #1 most visited webpage on the internet. The other day, Buzz was getting 42 pageviews a second. We had full reviews in numerous online publications around the world within a few hours of launch. Feedback ran from great, to ho-hum, to one commenter who said the engineers (I’m one of those) should be fired. Holy crap!
We launched as “beta”, which is the Web 2.0 way of saying “We’re new and growing. Don’t kill us!” There will be many updates and improvements, which should keep me quite busy. Overall, I’m happy with the results and look forward to the continued challenge.
Check it out and let me know what you think.
March 1st, 2008 at 10:35 am
Obviously, you got trumped by Katherine’s birth with this post.
However, I am not sure if I like the changes you’ve done here at azf2k, but they’re growing on me. The thing about Yahoo Buzz that I don’t like is that your voting on the news. What the hell is that. I went on and voted down a Britney Spears article. yuck. but then again I felt kinda weird about voting on an Iraq war story. Like did I wanna vote against the story or for it and for what reasons. I guess I don’t get the point of the page. is it too point out gossip, or news, or ohh my god, did you see that freakish 25lbs bodybuilding midget.
http://dpawsey.tripod.com/scarymofo.jpg
March 1st, 2008 at 10:54 am
Beautiful baby girl beats website launch any day. I figured as much, but wanted to just get this posted for posterity.
I know what you mean about voting. The best way to think about it is that with your vote you are saying whether or not you think a story is newsworthy. That vote then gets tallied with the masses.
The reality is that NASCAR is the most popular sport in the United States and a LOT of people (whether they admit it or not) love to read up on what Britney has done this time. Sad, but true.
This is beta and we will be increasing the number of publishers, so the diversity of content should improve with each release.
March 5th, 2008 at 8:29 am
DMAC Says:”I am not sure if I like the changes you’ve done here at azf2k,” - I like the font change on the header. Not so sure about the delicious tags so low on the screen.
I haven’t been to buzz yet, voting on news stories? I’ll get back to you on that.
I’ll keep my opinions about Britney’s behavior to myself.