Wednesday, August 01, 2012

Something New to Digg


Digg, with its spin on aggregating community driven news, was not performing well, resulting in the site being recently acquired for $500K by incubator Betaworks. It was formally rumored to be bid on by Google for $200Mil, so quite a depreciation! However, since the acquisition, a new version of the website was launched along with an iPhone app.

The new CEO has drastically reduced costs by changing the structure of the website, now run on more simple code and with fresh infrastructure. Digg will now only feature 3 sections- Top Stories, Popular and Upcoming. The site will work as follows:

“Stories show a big image, a headline, one-line summary, URL and selected tweets about the article. Readers have the option to "digg," or vote for, an article they like, save it to read later on the companion iPhone app or share it on Twitter or Facebook. To digg or save for later, you must log in with a Facebook account -- a limitation Digg says is only temporary.”

So when people Digg a story, a tally will be recorded by Digg’s infrastructure, which will display the score on the story, making it interactive with its readers. And it’s the readers Digg has to get back… “The absence of any ads is a sign that the focus will be on building a good product”.  So good luck to Digg in its effort to become a top crowd-sourced site!

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