On November 1, 2006 a new website was created named BuzzFeed and with it came Buzzfeed News. BuzzFeed was created by Jonah Perreti originally as a side project while he was working at the Huffington Post. At first BuzzFeed, had no employees and was just an instant messenger known as "BuzBot" which would notify users a link to trending topics. The messenger would use an "algorithm to cull stories from around the web that were showing stirrings of virality." The site began highlighting the most popular articles BuzzBot found. Soon after, Peretti hired curators to talk about the articles that were trending online. In 2011 Peretti hired Ben Smith, a worker for Politico, to assemble a news operation to the site as well as the many listicles.