You know those notes HR departments send around when an employee leaves? There are the ones that heap praise on the employee, thanking him or her for many contributions and providing info on the goodbye party? Then there are those that curtly state the employee has gone on to pursue "other opportunities." Yahoo's note on would-be Digg clone Buzz's demise is like the latter, although it's not clear there are any other opportunities for the company's social news recommendation service.

Yahoo! Buzz will be discontinued as of April 21, 2011. As of this date, you will be unable to access the Yahoo! Buzz site. This was a hard decision. However this will help us focus on our core strengths and new innovations.

We appreciate your patronage.

The Yahoo! Buzz Team

Yahoo Buzz, a social story sharing and ranking service introduced in 2008, has become the latest casualty of Yahoo's effort to hone its focus and turn around its business fortunes. The future of Yahoo Web properties like Buzz and social bookmarking site Delicious was first leaked in December via a Yahoo slideshow presentation that showed up on Twitter, though Yahoo has since said it is looking to sell off Delicious rather than kill it. Yahoo has also since made other moves to turn around its financials, including layoffs.

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Social story aggregation sites and services, such as Buzz and Digg, have had their ups and downs over the past few years and some of the strongest Internet companies like Facebook and Google have continued to pursue this area as well (Google recently launched a social search offering called +1). Probably not a good sign for Yahoo that the top 2 most searched on items seen on its Yahoo Buzz Log today were Facebook and Google's YouTube.

I'm a heavy user of social news aggregation sites such as Digg and Reddit, and I personally signed up for Yahoo Buzz from around the start. But I never found it to be anything special and abandoned it. Apparently, I was far from alone.

(Just for kicks, I tried to sub this post to Yahoo Buzz, but the system already didn't seem to be working...)

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