Month: June 2006

The expansion into World & Business, Entertainment, Science and Video, is Digg’s effort to attract a wider member base, though Technology will remain the default feed. Within hours, aside from a host of reviews, Digg users built hacks on version 3—one, for instance, returning the category bar back to the right-side of the screen. Here are a couple great synopses and reviews of the changes to peruse. Or you can listen to Kevin Rose present 3.0 himself—including more udpates to come.

The real revolution will come with a second push in July, when Digg introduces two new infosthetic features that visually display in detail what stories are getting relatively hot/cold, how many users say so, who says so, and if those diggers share common interests. Digg Incoming will allow users to scale vetting the +2000 incoming stories that come in daily (or rather make it possible for any one digger). New diggs will drop down like stacking blocks in realtime for each story, making quickly and easily comprehensible the relative popularity of hundreds of stories, lined up alongside each other, at a time. The other upcoming data visualization Rose calls “Digg spy on crack”—referring to the current Digg Spy, a running screen of realtime user activity (showing diggs, undiggs, comments, etc.). The new spy will display the dynamic bunching of user activity around popular stories like the movement of bees aggregating around burgeoning/wilting flowers.

AdWords advertisers will accumulate transaction fee discounts, even free usage, for increased sales. As an incentive to non-AdWords sellers, Google rates will be 2% + $.20 (in comparison to PayPal’s 1.9% + $.30) commission. Asked whether Google is considering including in search results direct-checkout options for other secure online transaction companies, representatives said only that the company would consider anything that would improve user experience.



“We can do that.”

Rupert Murdoch claims Google passed up the chance to buy MySpace at half the price he paid, just before it metastasised into 8% of Google’s search traffic. In the Verbatim of Wired’s July cover story, Murdoch summaries his impression of Google’s pass: “They thought, “It’s nothing special. We can do that.” Err… (via GigaOm)

Answering to Google

You can ask about Google, but in the end Google Answers answers to Google. In a string of playful submissions to Google Answers about the company itself, the tricksters are rooted out with a revealing final reply. Because Google Answers are written by non-employee researchers, the note says, they are not qualified to answer questions about the company. As SEW writes “Got that? Freelance researchers are apparently qualified to answer questions about any other company in the world, but when it comes to Google, special treatment is required. Incredible.”