Yahoo Buzz is being discontinued.

The company announced on the Buzz site on Monday that it was a “hard decision” while adding, “however this will help us focus on our core strengths and new innovations.”

The company will allow the product to run through April 21, providing customers with enough time to remove Yahoo Buzz buttons from their web properties.

Buzz was a success during it’s early launch in February 2008, overtaking Digg in May 2008 according to comScore reports, however the aggregator quickly lost market share to social media sharing on Facebook and Twitter, while sites such as Digg and in a larger way Reddit continued to build stronger products while Buzz continued on a rather stagnant non-innovation path.

Personally I was never a fan of the platform, Yahoo appeared in many cases to push their own networks content to the top of popular pages by muddling up what was actually user voted content and what content was placed on the site by Yahoo editorial staff. At it’s core the system favored Yahoo editorial choices and not those stories voted by users which took away from the social aspect of the program. [Read more…]