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New Digg Launches, Stumbles on Roll Out

by Terrence O'Brien on August 25, 2010 at 03:55 PM

The New Digg
After months of testing, the dramatically redesigned Digg has finally been opened to the public. Upon visiting the site, things immediately look different, but, hopefully, are sufficiently familiar to keep the social news site's user base from abandoning it. The once-king of viral news has increasingly suffered at the hands of more convenient sharing platforms like Twitter and Facebook, so, in order to compete, Digg has gotten faster, more streamlined and more personalized. For one, you can now easily share via other social networks the stories you've Dugg. Also, submitting a story to Digg is now a one-click affair (although new submissions will still need user-contributed headlines and descriptions).

Instead of making you wade through piles of "popular" links or browse by category, Digg now defaults to a new "My News" view, which only shows stories from sources you choose. These include the people you follow, but also the news outlets you enjoy, whether Slate or Wired. Digg is even helping to connect users with popular personalities through suggested user lists (in a way similar to Twitter). While Digg has kept its traditional "global" view -- now labeled "Top News" -- a filtered, more personally tailored news feed is now the future of the service. This deemphasizes the importance of "going popular" on Digg, and also limits users' ability to game the system by burying or boosting a story artificially.

The New Digg



Right off the bat, though, the new Digg suffered setbacks. It appears that the company was not fully prepared, and that many visitors were experiencing trouble. Sometimes, the site refused to load news stories or failed to log-in users. Founder Kevin Rose assured users, via Twitter, that the problem was being addressed, and that new servers were being brought online to handle the load.

The new social angle and integration with services like Twitter and Facebook were clearly necessary steps to maintaining relevancy, but the question is whether it's too little, too late. While Digg still holds a significant amount of power for driving traffic on the Web, it's hardly the powerhouse it was even just two short years ago. This radical relaunch does make the site faster and more convenient (two areas that were in desperate need of improvement), but it remains to be seen whether or not the more interactive and publisher-friendly approach will be enough to win back the users who have already left for greener (and less troll-laden) pastures.

Tags: Content Aggregation, ContentAggregation, digg, kevin rose, KevinRose, redesign, social bookmarking, SocialBookmarking, socialnetworking, top, web, web 2.0, Web2.0

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