Posts Tagged ‘new digg’
The New Digg: First Impressions
Ever since the new version of Digg was announced three months ago, it has undergone a lot of revisions and caused a lot of turmoil. In that time, Kevin Rose replaced Jay Adelson as CEO, reportedly unhappy with the direction Adelson was taking the company and the product.
The New Digg is almost here though, and we have access to the preview. Weve been playing around with the new interface and its many features, and weve compared them against both the old DiggDigg
and other platforms such as TwitterTwitter
and FacebookFacebook.
Here are our first impressions of the New Digg:
Digg Has a Suggested Users List
When you first log onto the New Digg (New.Digg.com), youre presented with a couple screens. The first one is Diggs version of the suggested users list a hand-picked list of people and companies to follow on Digg. The list includes everyone from Kevin Rose to The New York Times to MashableMashable, and it categorizes their accounts based on topic area.
Twitter spurred a lot of growth and created a small set of power accounts with its suggested user list (SUL) at least until this years changes. Still, these types of lists help new users get started, and acquiring fresh users is something Digg needs to do.
Even if this hand-picked version of the SUL isnt sustainable, it should give the company a boost in terms of new user engagement and retention.
Adding Content Is Much Easier
One of the first things that struck us when we finally got to the new Digg homepage was the prominence of the Digg It option. It looks and feels like the Facebook Publisher box. Whenever you enter in a link, it imports the title, finds images from the link, and lets gives you write a description and choose a topic. After that, all you have to do is click Digg It, and the link is broadcast to the Digg universe.
There are some other nice features about the new publishing box. For example, if you put in a link for a story thats already been submitted, it will alert you to the fact and display the Digg information for that specific link, complete with sharing tools and a Digg button. Its also a ubiquitous box: you will find it on many of the other pages in the New Digg.
Clearly, Digg is placing an emphasis on getting people to add more content and articles to the social news hub. As weve reported before, there is an option in the New Digg to link your RSS feed to your Digg account and auto-submit your posts for the communitys consideration.
Discovering Content
Content discovery has changed in the new version of Digg. There are two tabs on the top left of the interface: My News and Top News My News is the default homepage for all users. Unlike the current version of Digg, where content bubbles up from the overall community, the new version focuses on content coming from your friends and followers.
The new homepage no longer shows who submitted a story, but instead focuses on which of your friends dugg it. Even the sidebar focuses on how many of the people you follow have dugg a story, rather than whether or not a friend of your submitted it.
We welcome the change. It democratizes the site a bit more by reducing the need for publisher to hit the front page of Digg in order to generate any traffic. We saw content with between 16 and 150 Diggs on our personalized feed of news.
However, long-time Digg users dont have to worry. Top News is just like the current version of Digg, focusing on the top content from the collective Digg community. You can even sort top content by day, week, or month. There seems to be a minimum Digg count to appear on the week or month Top News charts though, as we only saw three news items between the two tabs.
Interface
The overhaul not only focused on the algorithms and content discovery, but also on the interface itself. Its definitely faster, cleaner, and more social. In our tests, we found it incredibly simple to navigate and a pleasure on the eyes. Unlike the last version of Digg, this is something that new users can quickly pick up and understand.
Its not perfect, though. Search still needs some work. For example, we found the exact same content from Mashable when we tried to resort by Most Recent or Best Match. Hopefully this is a small bug that will quickly be resolved.
Overall though, the New Digg is a remarkable improvement over its predecessor. It keeps much of the old look and feel of Digg, while giving it a much-needed refresh and emphasis on the social graph. Expect the new version to launch for all users very soon.
Replace From Jay
Hey all,
Got some news. After five years, forty million users, and an amazing
ride, I’ve decided to step down as CEO of Digg. With the new Digg
getting ready to launch, Digg Ads doing well, our sales force growing,
our hiring ramping, and the company maturing well beyond its startup
phase, I feel that now is the right time.
The entrepreneurial calling is strong, and I am ready to incubate some
new business ideas over the next twelve months. As the economy exits
a very deep recession, I believe that it is an excellent time for new
companies to develop. Of course, I will continue to serve as an
adviser to Digg. In the interim, Kevin has agreed to step in as
Chairman and CEO.
I’d like to thank Kevin, the Digg staff and the Digg community for
their support, insight and, most of all, their loyalty in turning Digg
into the force that it is today.
-Jay
Update from Kevin:
I want to be the first to thank Jay for the last five years of amazing
work. You’ve been a great friend and mentor, we wouldn’t be where we
are today if it wasn’t for you.
While I’ll miss working with Jay day-to-day I am excited to be taking on
the role of Chairman and acting CEO, driving Digg forward on our
promise to enable social curation of the world’s content and the
conversation around it. We’ve been super busy on the product side
getting ready for the upcoming Digg redesign and delivering our mobile
apps for the iPhone and Android.
Thank you very much for your on-going support of Digg, I’m truly
excited about the next five years, big things coming!
-Kevin
Inside The New Digg: An Interview With Ceo Jay Adelson
At last nights Bigg Digg Shindigg in Austin, TX, Digg CEO Jay Adelson briefly revealed plans for a massive overhaul of the social news site. This morning, I had an opportunity to chat with Adelson in-depth about the new Digg and what users, publishers and the web as a whole should expect.
To sum it up, Adelson says the new strategy will enable social curation of all the worlds content and the conversation around it. To get there though, DiggDigg has re-built its entire site from the ground up, with dramatic changes that will be rolled out over the coming weeks and months.
New User Experience
The days of the Digg homepage as we know it the most recently popular stories on the service as a whole are numbered. The site is shifting toward a personalization model, where the homepage will be based on characters like a users interests, location, who they follow not only on Digg but services like TwitterTwitter and FacebookFacebook, and other signals from around the web like retweets, Facebook shares and more.
But Adelson notes that not all of these signals are created equal for example, a retweet from a Twitter user with millions of followers will weigh much more heavily in the sites ranking algorithms than one from a user with a few dozen. The concept of a Digg account is also changing. While you can already use Digg via Facebook Connect, the site plans to support logging in with Twitter, GoogleGoogle, Yahoo and OpenID, among other identity providers.
It goes even further than that, though – users will be able to Digg and submit stories anonymously. Adelson says that this fundamental change will move the site from 20,000 submissions today to millions. Those submissions will be sorted into an infinite number of categories, with Digg auto-suggesting them with users able to make additions and help rearrange miscategorized posts.
Digg has also been watching what companies like Twitter and Facebook are doing for brands. The new Digg will eventually support publisher and brand profiles. Further, we might see something akin to Twitters suggested user list, where publishers and brands that accrue a large following and continually have popular content get recommended to Digg users.
Along those lines, Leaderboards will also be making a return to Digg, but not in the old form of showing just the most successful submitters site-wide. Instead, Adelson envisions leaderboards for the infinite topic and vertical pages that will emerge, letting Digg users become trusted sources in a given niche. Expect some sort of achievement system that will reward Digg users for good behavior as Adelson put it.
Because of all these changes, Diggs suite of mobile apps is also going to be completely revamped, with changes closely mirroring those on the site.
Source: mashable.com