RSSDigg: From Cult Favorite to Mainstream
By Ed Oswald | Published June 22, 2006, 8:00 PM
When AOL debuted the new Netscape.com last Thursday, one of the first stories to appear on the site's front page read "AOL Copies Digg." To many a fan of the popular social news site, such a headline could not have been truer.
From the capability to vote on stories and the ability to see what your friends are voting on, Netscape had hopped on the new "social news" bandwagon pioneered by Digg. Even the front page itself looked very familiar. But the folks at Digg weren't flattered.
Behind the scenes at Digg headquarters near San Francisco, the 15 employees of the rapidly growing Web startup were putting the finishing touches on the next version of the social news site. The new Digg takes a step forward in transitioning the site from cult favorite to the mainstream Internet public.
However, AOL's Jason Calacanis and his team of former Weblogs, Inc. employees beat Digg to the punch by a full week with Netscape -- offering a site that not only aggregated the day's top technology stories, but topics ranging from entertainment to even video.
That isn't stopping founder Kevin Rose and others, who had some choice words for Calacanis. "He cloned us at the wrong time," Rose told BetaNews in an interview earlier this week. "He should have waited." Jay Adelson, who serves as the company's CEO, echoed Rose's sentiments. "They're doing what we did years ago," he added.
Launching at a Thursday evening event in San Francisco and as a beta on Monday, the new Digg is a clear attempt to break out of the cult status the site has attained in the vein of Slashdot. Now, the company is attempting to attract new visitors through a move outside of tech news, Rose says.
While the site already splits itself into categories, Digg 3.0 will make this a major factor in navigating. The technology category would remain as a top section, however related categories including robots, security, Apple, design, gadgets, and hardware would be merged underneath it.
Science will also remain as a top category, with subcategories that include environment and space; as would gaming, which includes gaming news, and playable Web games. Joining these would be new top-level categories entertainment, including celebrities, movies, music and television; and world and business, which includes business, world, political, and offbeat topics.
Also, the site will allow for the first time the "digging" of videos, which will be placed under their own section. "It's a ground up redesign of Digg," Adelson said.
Registering as a user provides extra benefits. A user would be able to select which topics they are interested in, and only follow those from the front page. The page would also include statistics on what a user's friends were digging, including number of dugg stories, matching diggs, comments, and submission statistics. All in all, it leads to a more customizable experience when visiting Digg, the two explained.
The demand for an expansion beyond technology as well as more control over the experience was near immediate. "Almost two months after we launched, we saw this demand" through what visitors were submitting, Rose admitted. "However, we didn't want to overwhelm the user."
These demands have increased proportionately to the popularity of the site. Adelson said in June of last year, 30,000 visitors per month were accessing the site. Now, that number has skyrocketed to nearly 8.5 million visitors per month.
"It became clear by the fall of last year that we couldn't run Digg on the original structure of the site," he said. Thus, changes were made to both the statistical side of things to continue to keep the ranking mechanism fair and changes were made to the company's backend to make its database more scalable, which also makes the new features introduced Thursday possible.
I myself am a user of Digg and I find it fair that the creators make money out of it. Their job is not to censor the content, but maintaining and develop their system. That's no doubt a big task. As long as Digg sustain it's community of eager users, I'll continue visiting.
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|Digg has the potential of being a huge sounding board, an international public forum.
When you look at digg wanna-be, Netscape -- you have another division of AOL, with conflicts, probable censorship and ethical bankruptcy of the AOL corporate culture.
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|Bravo Digg -- it is actually replacing the AOL of old. Remember? Before AOL was taken over by folks who threatened you with violence when you correct them on message boards?
We need something like Digg. And if Digg weren't here, something else would be.
If Netscape continues to copy Digg, we should remember that AOL owns Netscape, and that AOL has violated almost every online law and ethical rule.
I don't trust Netscape, and I won't use Steve Case's new car rental business. Even if it is only $1 per day for a fully-gassed Mercedes. I won't give my credit card or debit card number to people who steal, defraud and deny.
Boycott Netscape, Time-Warner, Warner Brothers, Viacom, and every sponsor, partner, investor and even the subscribers. Punish everything associated with the beast of the Internet, and ask your elected officials why Steve Case is not in jail.
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|Digg is retarded. I've been there maybe twice to see what the big deal is and I just can't see it.
What is the big deal? Am I the only one who doesn't care about Digg.com?
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|I concur. The site desing alone the last time I went there scared me off.
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|Digg is a community website so it is run by its users. They do have to make money in order to run the site.
Don't be so 1 minded!
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|8.5 million unique visitors per month and doubling every month. Can you even image their Adsense revenue alone and only 15 employees.
It would be nice if they shared their profits among the drone workers who post news articles and rate them while thiking all the time that they are benefitting the community.
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|I use digg, but I don't understand the business model. It's also increasingly annoyingly slow and I hold no love or loyalty for the site. I probably check out 1/20 of the stories, and often pang for at least some editorial control, many of the links are fluff, need mirrors, spam, blog spam, blog redirects, etc.
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|Digg asks users to post articles, rate them, read them. People waste hours of time doing just that. Then digg makes money off collecting data and selling that to companies, makes money off the Adsense ads without doing any jounrnalistic work.
Fricking good idea to make money. Let others do your job!
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