By: Aseem Gaurav on August 1, 2012
After a six-week sprint, a former a former trailblazer in social news aggregation, Digg, has been relaunched.
Entitled Digg v1, the new-look Digg now features sharp images along with text – thus offering you a view of what you’re about to read or share. Along with the revamped Diff website, incubator Betaworks has also released a iPhone app, one day ahead of schedule. New York-based tech group Betaworks bought the site last month for $500,000 to combine it with its existing product News.me.
On July 20, the company announced that it is rebuilding Digg from scratch and within six weeks, the new service was made available to the public with fresh code and infrastructure.
The new website now has three sections: Top Stories, Popular and Upcoming, all of which are on the main page. First on the page are Top Stores which shows a big image, headline and an abstract and few tweets about the article. You have the option to “dig” it, or vote for, save it to read later on iPhone app or share it on Twitter or Facebook.
Similarly, the Popular section shows the most shared stories on the social media pioneer in the last eight hours, but only with headline and some related tweets. The Upcoming section list the latest stories that are submitted by users.
While the new website still allows users to digg stories – the old algorthim for determining what stores are most popular is replaced by a simple score system that is sum of three numbers: the number of diggs, the number of times a story is shared on Facebook and the number of tweets.
To make Digg a more social and relevant experience, it will include network-based personalisation features, which it has borrowed from News.me. Betaworks also says it is now looking at every aspect of the site to see what works and what doesn’t. It is also experimenting with new commenting features.
According to Google Analytics, there are 16.3 million monthly users still on Digg, and three million to five million people actively using the service in any given month. The big challenge for Betaworks would be now to rebuild an active community and to carry on all the good work it has done in the past.
After a six-week sprint, a former a former trailblazer in social news aggregation, Digg, has been relaunched.
Entitled Digg v1, the new-look Digg now features sharp images along with text – thus offering you a view of what you’re about to read or share. Along with the revamped Diff website, incubator Betaworks has also released a iPhone app, one day ahead of schedule. New York-based tech group Betaworks bought the site last month for $500,000 to combine it with its existing product News.me.
On July 20, the company announced that it is rebuilding Digg from scratch and within six weeks, the new service was made available to the public with fresh code and infrastructure.
The new website now has three sections: Top Stories, Popular and Upcoming, all of which are on the main page. First on the page are Top Stores which shows a big image, headline and an abstract and few tweets about the article. You have the option to “dig” it, or vote for, save it to read later on iPhone app or share it on Twitter or Facebook.
Similarly, the Popular section shows the most shared stories on the social media pioneer in the last eight hours, but only with headline and some related tweets. The Upcoming section list the latest stories that are submitted by users.
While the new website still allows users to digg stories – the old algorthim for determining what stores are most popular is replaced by a simple score system that is sum of three numbers: the number of diggs, the number of times a story is shared on Facebook and the number of tweets.
To make Digg a more social and relevant experience, it will include network-based personalisation features, which it has borrowed from News.me. Betaworks also says it is now looking at every aspect of the site to see what works and what doesn’t. It is also experimenting with new commenting features.
According to Google Analytics, there are 16.3 million monthly users still on Digg, and three million to five million people actively using the service in any given month. The big challenge for Betaworks would be now to rebuild an active community and to carry on all the good work it has done in the past.
