Digg Newsrooms, a reason to go back ?
Posted Friday, September 23, 2011 at 7:52 am by Jason Cartwright
We all over Digg v4 ? Good, time to move on. This morning Digg have taken the wraps off a brand new feature called Newsrooms. While Digg’s front page is driven by the community, there is issues with leaving content select to the masses – just ask twitter trends.
Digg Newsrooms, currently in private beta, aims to offer a more refined and relevant source of news. By following the Newsrooms of your favourite topic, Technology, Science, Politics and many others, you get stories from influential people in that area.
Once you dive into a topic, the most influential users in that genre are displayed complete with an overall ranking, with a breakdown of how they achieved that number. This is very Klout-esk, a service that ranks influential people who are socially active, which come to think of it, suspiciously lacks Digg support.
To get Newsrooms, you need to have signed up for the beta, if you didn’t crawl to a Facebook friend who did. Facebook connection is required for Digg Newsrooms. Only time will tell if new features like Newsrooms will bring back the core Digg audience, but engaging a leaderboard is something Digg was heavily criticized for removing.
Digg tries again with another new design, adds stats, notifications
Posted Tuesday, February 1, 2011 at 11:35 am by Jason Cartwright
Its no secret Digg.com is struggling. Traffic to the site has decreased since the community was largely unhappy with the v4 revision. Regular visitors to the homepage of Digg were used to seeing stories with thousands of votes, this has dropped in some cases to double-digits. Its sad I think its a good service, but when your slow to innovate in the face of competition from Twitter and Facebook, users go elsewhere.
To be honest the new design isn’t fundamentally different, but does apply tweaks in a couple of key areas.
- Notifications – get notified when your story makes it to Top News
- Profile Statistics
If your someone who pays close attention to stats, then you’ll be happy with the updated profile dropdown. When logged in, it allows you to see the numbers for Diggs, Comments, Submissions, Followers and Following. Notifications will display next to your profile picture at the top-right, a feature clearly derived from Facebook, but a good one none the less.
When visiting your profile page, you can now get detailed information about your behaviour on Digg.
Digg also took this opportunity to announce their current Top 20 Users, a controversial removal in earlier revisions.
If your one of the 15% of Digg users who are offered the new design you will see an opt-in banner at the top of the page when you log in. Remember you can return to the old design.. for now.
So will these changes really help Digg turn it around ? I strongly doubt it, it still doesn’t address the core issue of why someone would use Digg if they are sharing links on Twitter. Digg should have bought Delicious when Yahoo was trying to flip it, that would have made a much more significant impact and actually gave a lot more people a reason to use Digg. It is after all called a Social bookmarking site.
More information about the new Digg design on the Digg Blog.
Invited: Digg4 invites go out to thousands.
Posted Thursday, July 1, 2010 at 1:22 pm by Jason Cartwright
Social bookmarking site Digg.com has begun sending out thousands of invites to users who registered for the Alpha. These will come in batches, probably a good idea given the first round brought the site to a grind. After receiving the email below, I tried to login but it went nowhere. If this happens for you, basically just try again later.
Now the login is sorted, the on boarding process begins.
Naturally its still Alpha, so there’s going to be some issues. Good to see Digg’s developers have a sense of humour.
And now the new interface…
Digg Feed Submission verification code: fc2a7a14eecf4cbabb85727ac672b773
More soon.
Digg 4.0 gets all warm and friendly, still months away
Posted Saturday, May 29, 2010 at 10:50 am by Jason CartwrightIn this publisher preview video above, Digg’s Founder and CEO Kevin Rose explains the upcoming features in version 4. The big change comes from the way the Digg system works. Currently you Digg stories up when you like them, if enough people do that they make it to the front page. That’s an oversimplification but you get the idea. In Digg v4 your homepage will be filled with a Facebook-style feed of what your friends are digging so if you haven’t got many friends on Digg, you better find some. There will be an transition or on-boarding process for existing users where you select people to follow from a suggested user list similar to that of Twitter.
Naturally there’s still going to be the Top News section that does feature the most popular stories Digg-wide, but the focus has certainly shifted to having your friends be the focus for surfacing new and exciting content.
For publishers (like techAU) we’ll have the ability to auto-publish an RSS feed to Digg, removing the hassle for end users to submit stories manually. While we’re on that topic of submissions, if you’ve ever submitted a story to Digg before, you’ll know it’s a fairly lengthy process. In Digg 4. 0 submissions will become a lot easier. Simply submit the link to the content you want to share, choose a thumbnail and category and your done. This simplification is sure to increase the amount of content submitted – smart move Digg.
At the end of the video Kevin says “there’ll be a lot more features we’ll talk about over the coming weeks and months”, so you could assume from that statement that we won’t be seeing the release of 4.0 for quite some time.
via TechCrunch
Official Digg iPhone App now available in App Store
Posted Thursday, March 25, 2010 at 5:02 pm by Jason CartwrightWhilst many have tried, almost all have failed at creating that killer iPhone app for Digg.com. The biggest stumbling block for other developers is that Digg has prevented Digging from within the app. Some opted to workaround this by using a Web View, but it just hasn’t been a great experience.
The Official Digg iPhone application offers a slick interface into stories on Digg.com. Whilst the app does a good job at delivering stories and social sharing, it fails to give any control over management of friends or your Digg Profile. This is a 1.0 product, so user feedback is sure to drive development of the app.
Not sure why it took so long to arrive, but I’m glad it’s here. Expect interactions on Digg to increase as a result of launching the application. You can easily Digg stories and comments up or down, as well as add stories to your list of favourites.
Download the free Digg app from the App Store.
