Boy, that team over at Yahoo is something, aren’t they? Everyone keeps saying how Yahoo is falling behind Google, and they just don’t have the mojo any more, and how their peanut butter is spread too thin or whatever (don’t ask), but someone over there must have been burning the midnight programming oil, because somehow they managed to sneak into Digg’s secret compound and steal the code for their voting system.
As described over on Yahoo’s “Yodel Anecdotal” blog (come on — could any organization whose blog has a dumb name like that really be evil?), the company has added Digg-style voting for what amount to online suggestion boxes on many of their sites, including their auto hub, real estate hub, etc. They’ve even enabled it for the new Yahoo Pipes, so I can head over there and suggest that they change the name to Yahoo Tubes, in honour of Senator Whatshisname and his metaphor for the Internet.
As Loren Baker at Search Engine Journal and Frantic Industries and L.M. Orchard at DecafBad point out, the frenzy of Yahoo-bashing that this caused over at Digg is ridiculous — while at the same time not totally surprising, given the nature of the site and the mob mentality it often produces. Digg no more invented the idea of voting things up or down than I invented faster-than-light travel (oops, that was supposed to be a secret too). The inimitable Jason Calacanis has more on that here.
I’m with Mike Arrington: Digg fans need to chillax. (screenshot comes from Cory at Lost Remote).
Update:
Frantic Industries notes that Microsoft seems to be getting into this game too, but so far only on foreign MSN sites. It doesn’t look much like Digg, either, so maybe the fan boys will leave it alone.