Sunday night, loyal diggers were online submitting sentimental screenshots of the 2.0 face. And when Digg was unavailable during the transition, one digger created a commemorative mirror of the down page (complete with rolling midi). On Monday, at 6 am (PST) Digg 3.0 went live with three new non-tech news categories, the addition of video (the first non-news container), and tighter tracking tabs on friends’ digging activity.
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.
In other Digg news:
– CNet just added a Digg button to all their pages, likely the first major, traditional media outlet to do so.
– Digg’s taffic is rapidly approaching comparison to that of the New York Times.
– Rose made number 23 in Business 2.0 top ’50 Who Matter Now’ (alongside Wikipedia).
(via Melanie)
Overall, I like the latest changes. Nothing out-of-this-world from what they were doing, but nice look and tools. However, what you describe sounds very cool, particularrly more real time ways of viewing user activity. And this is coming next month . . . cool.
I imagine that when Pligg gets its social networking functionality sorted it will be superior to version 3.0 of Digg… which will mean lots of Digg like sites out there with superior functionality.
I therefore imagine Digg will add more community and interation functionality soon also.
I would then see the opportunity to move to verticalize the Digg site and create industry specific communities. Different functionality (of course) but a little like an ad impression based TechTarget (with its traffic/usage on steroids).
I’ve found that verticalized sites are easier to generate higher yield advertising cash from.
Just a thought…
I commenented on this just the other day and had a sharp spike in traffic as a result – the stats are posted here…
http://www.webmetricsguru.com/2006/06/v3_dugg_is_not_the_end_of_the.html