Remaining relevant
In the eyes of many, Digg has become the default link recommendation service. While a small number of Diggs has little effect on the popularity of a piece of content, if you get enough to get on the Digg homepage it can snowball to massive traffic.
But the desirability of getting a lot of Diggs has also led to the feeling that the system can be gamed by power users, and that hardcore Digg sub-communities can wield excessive influence over which stories become prominent.
The success of Digg - and its popular button to facilitate submission of a link - has also meant a lot of other people jumping on the bandwagon. While sites like Delicious and StumbleUpon seemed to have little effect on Digg's success, once Facebook and Twitter began to integrate themselves further into the link-sharing infrastructure, the writing seemed to be on the wall for Digg.
So for the past year, founder Kevin Rose and his team have been beavering away to make ‘v4' of Digg and it was finally released to the outside world yesterday. "Our goal has always been for Digg to be a place where people can discover and share content and conversations from anywhere on the web. With Digg v4, we are introducing a few things that will make discovering and discussing news a lot better," said Rose in a blog post.
The three pillars of the new version are: speed, personalisation and friends. There seems to be much more of an emphasis on social networking - sharing with friends, as opposed to everyone - than there was before, and there have also been moves to ensure your own homepage has more of the sort of thing you want. There's a video below with Rose explaining Digg v4.
Our first thoughts were that Digg has had the link-sharing initiative taken away from it and now, rather than being a pioneer, it appears to be playing catch-up with Facebook. In fact, one of the first questions you're asked when logging on to the new version is whether you want to import your contacts from Facebook, Twitter or Google.
The problem Facebook and Twitter create for everyone else is their ubiquity. When you already know your ‘friends' are on both of them - already sending out links to whatever happens to have caught their eye - why invest in yet another social network?
This is a problem faced by everyone - even Google - and the challenge is to create some functionality that is so compelling that it's worth spending time on that social network as well as the big two. We'll let you be the judge of whether Digg has managed that.
Walkthrough the new Digg with Kevin Rose from Digg Videos on Vimeo.
