Digg
Last week the new version of Digg was taken out of beta testing and set live for the world to enjoy. We first heard about Digg version 4 about four or five months ago at the South by South West Interactive Conference in America when then CEO Jay Aldelson hinted at new features like personalised feeds among other things. Jay Aldelson has since left Digg and was replaced as CEO by founder Kevin Rose.
According to
Mashable the new version of Digg focuses on delivering a more personalised experience for the user. The overhauled social network now boasts quicker loading times as well as a “My News” feature (replacing the “Digg Effect”) which displays stories that have been dugg and submitted by people you follow. These are then displayed directly onto your homepage. Other new and improved features include the prominence of the Digg it button which sits at the top right of the page. Once you select a link that you want to Digg, the site will import titles and images and let you write a description of the link making it easy for fellow Diggers to understand and Digg the link.
The homepage has also been redesigned. At the top left of the interface are two tabs, Top News and My News (mentioned above) which is the default homepage for all users. The main difference between the old and new Digg is that now content on your homepage is submitted by people you follow as opposed to the larger Digg community making it more relevant for you. It also now focuses on which of your friend’s dugg the link as opposed to submitted it which is more in keeping with the brand. You can see a screen shot of the new Digg below.
New Digg Homepage
However for those of you who are not such big fans of change the Top News feature pulls articles and links from the wider Digg community and is basically the same as the older version so there’s no need to worry.
Over all I think the new Digg looks cool and it is definitely more user friendly than the previous version. In the same way Facebook took inspiration for its Places platform from Foursquare, Digg are definitely using Twitter as their mews when it comes to finding and suggesting people to follow. Digg have created suggested user lists that divide diggers up into categories in the same way Twitter does but unfortunately there isn’t as much choice as there is on Twitter due to the fact that Twitter simply has more users.
Below is a cool video of Kevin Rose introducing the features of Digg Version 4. In my opinion it is definitely an improvement and although it isn’t perfect it makes finding content that is relevant to you a lot easier. I definitely digg the new Digg but unfortunately still prefer twitter. Have a look and see what you think. As always please leave your thoughts, they are all welcome.
Kevin Rose explains the new Digg