Yahoo Buzz is opened to the public

Yahoo's Digg-like service, Buzz, was opened up to the world on Monday night.

Until now, while anyone could see stories that had been Buzzed and vote them up or down, only about 400 publishers could contribute new links to the service.

A Yahoo spokesperson confirmed it was always Yahoo's intention to open up Buzz, but that it kept the service restricted while it worked out bugs and refined the product.

Yahoo set a unique goal for Buzz: it's designed to feed stories to the Yahoo home page. And unlike pure community vote sites such as Digg and Reddit, Buzz's algorithms also take into account search-engine popularity. (Yahoo's editors still program the Yahoo.com front page manually; Buzz is a feeder system.)

Buzz also can take advantage of other Yahoo communities; Delicious, Flickr and Upcoming could get prominent Buzz links to feed items into the system. That won't appear initially, but links the other way will: when you 'Buzz' something, you'll also be able to share it on Delicious, or on Digg, StumbleUpon, or other services.

While some may be tempted to discount Buzz as just another content voting site, they might be missing the point. Publishers cannot afford to ignore Buzz, since popular stories on the service can get placement on the Yahoo page, and that could drive large amounts of traffic back. As a result, competition for Buzz votes is likely to be strong.