Some time ago Yahoo! announced the launching of Yahoo! Buzz, a service which you can share stories, images or videos with million people. Now, Yahoo! Buzz is opened to the public and you can enjoy of its services, being perfect to drive traffic to a website.

If you manage a website, there are some buttons that you can add to your site to buzz your content. The people can vote up/down any article, so as you can imagine the most voted stories will be show in the home page of this service, getting exposition in front of million users.

Will Yahoo! Buzz Beat Digg?

As you see, Yahoo! Buzz is a social service like Digg, Mixx, Reddit and that kind of networks… Yahoo! has the power that any social network actually have, being this a big company with years of experience, do you think that Buzz will Kill Digg? I personally think thatt Yahoo! Buzz could be a good competitor of Digg, the categories are basically the same but there are some differences between them.

In the social aspect, at Yahoo! Buzz you cannot add comments to a story, something that reduce its points in front of Digg. You can send the stories by email to your friends or coworkers, like every network allow it.

However, I think that Yahoo! is not comming with a competition’s attitude because you can share the stories submitted on Buzz in the most popular communities: Delicious, Digg, Facebook, Propeller, Reddit and StumbleUpon. So I think they are comming with a friendly attitude, aimed to improve the web.

I think if they integrate a profile system to Buzz which you could comment, flag users and that kind of things, it would be better to them. I mean, it would be nice to have the MyBlogLog’s profile merged to this service, what do you think?

Yahoo! Buzz Plugin for Wordpress

You can manually add the Buzz buttons to your site or blog. But it don’t took much time to be a plugin for wordpress, letting you to integrate the buttons to each post. Travis Johnson has created this plugin, thank you for that!

The following ones are the steps you need to follow to integrate Yahoo! Buzz to your blog:

1. Download the Yahoo! Buzz Wordpress plugin.
2. Unzip the file in your computer.
3. Upload the file wpbuzz.php to the plugins directory.
4. Activate the plugin from your wordpress blog’s admin section.
5. Now go to Settings -> Buzz on Yahoo!
6. Select the look and feel of button you would like. Here the button details are given in text without graphics, so this Yahoo buttons page would be of your help.
7. That’s it, you would see the Yahoo buzz button appearing at bottom of each of your posts.

Something I think it can be improved in this plugin is to have options like the Sphinn button plugin, which you can place the button at the top, botton left/right of your posts.

What do you think about this new Yahoo! service? I would like to read your opinions!