The New Digg – Somewhere Between Twitter And The Old Digg
I’ve been a big fan of social new site Digg for years now. I started using it about 4 years ago when I was in the USA and have always found it great for finding good content (albeit very American focused content). It was a social media site well before the term had ever been coined and it gets 10s of millions of visitors per month. It’s also incredibly handy as a publisher for driving huge amounts of traffic if you are lucky to get featured on the homepage. I’ve had stories on that homepage 5 times now and it usually drives anywhere between 10 and 100k visitors to your site. Having said all those good things Digg has really become less useful in the last year and really fallen off the radar as newer more exciting and relevant content sites like Twitter have burst on to the scene. Luckily with Kevin Rose back at the helm Digg is about to be relaunched and after playing with it for a couple of weeks I have to say I really like what I see…
Less Focus On The Homepage
The problem with the old Digg was the only way to benefit as a Publisher was to appear on the homepage which I can tell you is a very tricky thing to do. It was an all or nothing sort of situation and was starting to get dominated by the bigger publishers. The New Digg is built in such a way that it is more about the news within your network rather than the homepage. Your story can still spread and get huge traffic but you are now more likely to get a smaller amount of traffic like say 500 visitors. In short the lottery nature of Digg has been removed and your content has more chance of being found.
Streamlined Submission Process
The old submission process on Digg was fairly painful and would have been a major barrier to entry for adding content. The new site allows you to pretty much add content with one click and does a lot of the work for you which will be a publishers dream. If you also take in to account that you can pull content in via RSS so as you never have to individually submit posts again it really is a massive improvement. This should see a huge rise in the amount of content that gets submitted to Digg but I’ll be interested to see how they combat the spam from here on in.
Could This Change USA Bias?
I have always loved Digg as a site but find myself wishing there was a UK and IRL version so as I could get local news. American politics and sports have little or no interest to me so I usually use Digg to find funny videos or stories with international appeal. This change in the way Digg works allows me to choose my network and the people I follow allowing me to make a sort of mini Digg based on my own tastes through the “my news” tab.
Less Noise Than Twitter
Lets face the fact that most people are on Twitter for some sort of self promotion. So many people share links but it is often mixed with meaningless content like what people are having for dinner. The challenge with Twitter is trying to set up your stream in such a way that you only find the good links. I think the new Digg will sit in that place that is just for content and cut out a lot of the meaningless chatter. People are on Digg for the sole purpose of finding the best content through their network and I think that is a good thing. The best content will be curated for you and passed through your stream in a similar way to Twitter. The old Digg was too slow and clunky and gave you a very narrow view of the world’s content based on the homepage, that all changes now with this release and personal streams.
Fast As Anything
One of the issues that I always had with digg was that it was so slow as a site to load and then they started introducing things like the Digg Bar and other silly innovations that slowed the site down to a level where it was nearly unusable. The good news is that the new site is lightening fast with no drag on the pages. It’s a much nicer cleaner experience and one that I fly around finding great content.
Verdict
I wanted to leave it a while after first using it to write this review and I have to say I am impressed so far. The innovation is back at Digg and that is a good thing for the users. I am able to find lots more content as a result of the networks of people I can follow. I think they have looked at Twitter very closely and seen some of the success that they have had with things like the Retweet and copied that network effect. As a publisher I can see how I could now use Digg in a meaningful way to build small amounts of traffic rather than submitting a blog post and having it go nowhere. I can see lots more people using the new Digg, tons more content going in to the system (that might not be all a good thing) and easier tools to network and engage with other users on Digg. This will be getting opened up to the wider world very soon and I think it will really be a great step forward for Digg and will see tons of new people using the service in a very different way.
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