Earlier this year, Yahoo! opened its Buzz social news service, and its been very successful, surpassing Digg in terms of unique U.S. visitors. One noteworthy difference between Buzz and other sites is that only approved publishers were able to submit stories. However, on Monday Yahoo! opened Buzz up to all publishers.
Propeller, AOL's Digg clone, has been revamped in a major way as of Tuesday. The revamp had already been announced, but the magnitude of it surprised me. Not only have they dropped voting for an obscure "prop" functionality (prop a story up, get it?), where a story is ranked 1-10 based on a number of factors.
Social software sites like Flickr and Digg aren't just distracting you from your job — they could actually make your job disappear in the next high tech economic revolution. Get ready to retrain yourself right now.
