Yes, I know I’ve written many times that sites adding voting features is not news anymore, but a couple of giants that were lagging behind are now catching up, so it’s worth a few lines. Latest example is Yahoo!, which added 14 Suggestion boards, where users can give suggestions for various Yahoo! services.

The functionality is that of a standard social-content site: read, submit, vote, comment. You can check it out here at the Yahoo! Answers suggestion board.

On Digg, of course, there’s an outburst of negativity, with the title of the story suggesting it was a Digg rip-off. It’s not. Digg doesn’t have the RSVC (read submit vote comment) set of features copyrighted. Everyone is free to use it, there’s hundreds of sites that have the same or similar functionality, and there will be thousands of them before 2007 is over. Many of the comments in this particular Digg story acknowledge and understand this which shows that Digg is not an entirely immature community, but stories about sites ripping off Digg (unless they really stole the design or the code) are completely pointless and I hope this silly trend is going to end soon.

*Update: Digg users have massively spammed Yahoo’s suggestion boards, which now look … well, like hate mail. As much as I love Digg, I sense that this kind of attitude is going to severely diminish what’s left of Digg’s importance as a serious news site.