Yahoo Buzz Leaker Dealt With

Yahoo! Buzz was launched on Monday with a lot of buzz. Being leaked information about on repeated occasions, everybody had their hopes high about the Yahoo! branded Digg clone. It turns out that negative publicity isn’t all that constructive. I remember reading at some point in college a quote saying that bad publicity is still publicity, and having the name being heard is better than having it surrounded in silence.

Buzz’s situation is quite the opposite of that. Being waited for by the online community as the savior of Yahoo!’s dark gray standing at the moment, it failed. Not only failed, it did that miserably. The feature it was leaked as being its strong point, namely the option to buzz up some piece of news that you enjoyed and consider relevant and interesting, is a letdown. Valleywag quotes AllThingsD’s John Paczowski saying that "posted a story 90 minutes ago, and readers are telling me they can't buzz it up." It was unflattering to Yahoo!, maybe that’s why.

A commenter on the article, claiming to have some inside information from Yahoo!, said that General Counsel Michael Callahan hunted the man responsible for the public’s expectations about the newly launched site and "sent out a note saying that the person who leaked Buzz had been found and dealt with." That sounds like some medieval punishment occurred, or some Omerta breaking was involved.

You might remember Michael Callahan from the scandal in which he involved Yahoo! in October – November last year, after turning in a dissident to the Chinese government. In a way, one might say that the poor fellow now in jail has also been dealt with, but the terms there were completely different.

Will Buzz be Yahoo!’s savior? Not likely, by the way it looks right now it’s more like a nail in its coffin.

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