Bye to Buzz, hello to 4Cast
Jinfo Blog

By Penny Crossland

Item

The lines between search engines, social media platforms and content providers are increasingly becoming blurred, with news publishers adopting social media functions to keep the punters on their sites and search engines turning towards content provision and away from pure aggregation. The main search engines have been very busy in recent weeks developing new content strategies.

Consolidation of sites owned by Yahoo! continues apace. As reported on LiveWire last month, Yahoo! has been spending a large part of this year to date closing loss-making or unpopular sites as part of its strategy of moving towards more content generation.

In late April, the search engine discontinued Yahoo! Buzz, a community-based site similar to Digg, which allowed users to bookmark articles and share them. Buzz’s unique feature was the ability for users to modify their submission, however it proved to be unpopular and as Revolution Magazine’s blog put it has been sent to the “social media graveyard”. Undeterred, Yahoo! continues to launch new products in a bid to differentiate itself from its competitors.

Now we hear that Yahoo! is reaching out to the community via a new site called Yahoo! 4Cast, which on the face of it looks like Yahoo! Answers or Quora (read LiveWire’s comment on Quora here) combined with a gaming element. Users are encouraged to discuss topics and predict outcomes on a variety of subjects from celebrity news to finance and politics. You can win points on a leaderboard for predicting accurate outcomes.

Do we really need this? One wonders if Yahoo! is trying too hard with this one – it will be interesting to see if 4Cast manages to escape that social media graveyard mentioned above.

At the same time as Yahoo! Buzz disappearing, Google has said goodbye to its video site, Google Video, which, as Mashable pointed out was hardly surprising. If anything, one wonders what took Google so long, since YouTube has gone from strength to strength since being part of the Google stable of products.

In fact, YouTube is moving towards original content provision by adding a broadcasting element to its services. At the beginning of April it introduced a live video platform, which means that eventually YouTube viewers will be able to watch live sports and news events online – and they will stay on the site for much longer than now, much to the joy of advertisers.

« Blog