Digg 'killing' the DiggBar, unbanning domains
Digg to do away with its software-free toolbar in upcoming version of site. The news comes within hours of Digg's CEO Jay Adelson stepping down.
More big news out of the Digg camp this week. Late Monday, Digg founder (and now interim CEO) Kevin Rose announced via blog post that the company would be "killing" the DiggBar, the iFrame-based content viewer that caused a lion's share of controversy when it was launched this time last year.
Rose criticized the DiggBar's user experience as "inconsistent" and "wonky," and called the feature "bad for the Internet." According to Rose, the company will instead choose to focus on its browser extensions, which offer many of the same features that could be found in the DiggBar. Rose said Digg will overhaul these add-ons in a few months.
Along with the removal of the DiggBar, Digg plans to un-ban all domains that have been banned in the past. This could open up the site to a lot of junk, but Rose said that a set of "automated filters" will catch items that violate the site's terms of service.
The timing of the announcement may be the most interesting bit of this news. On Monday morning, (now former) Digg CEO Jay Adelson announced his immediate departure from the company, leaving site founder Kevin Rose with the reins. Adelson had been Digg's CEO since 2004. The sudden announcement that the DiggBar would be kaput on the very same day raises the question as to whether it had been a source of tension between the two.
A few scattered instances on Rose's part seem to point to this conclusion. For instance, Rose seemed to be an outsider on some of the decisions surrounding its existence, including a somewhat infamous Twitter status update last July, when he mentioned "not being aware" of a change that significantly reduced the utility of the DiggBar's URL shortening capabilities. Rose also got caught on a Diggnation video being a bit disgusted that another company was framing the video content on Revision3, equating the practice to theft.
In any event, the impending removal of the feature from Digg hints that some other sweeping changes to Digg 2.0 could be on the way. The next few months should be interesting.