The DiggBar relaunches, minus a useful feature
The DiggBar is no more--for unregistered users that is. The company has turned it into an opt-in experience in response to user and media backlash.
As announced last week, Digg relaunched its DiggBar feature late Tuesday, making it something that only appears for registered users, who are now able to turn it off completely. That new option shows up in Digg's user settings panel which means users can choose whether they feel like using it.
Along with the change, the company has also adjusted the DiggBar's behavior once you leave the site to go read a story. For one it's smaller, in an attempt to take up less space on sites you're visiting. Digg has also "temporarily" removed the view count, which showed users how many times the story had been read by Digg users.
John Quinn, Digg's vice president of engineering, says the removal of the view count was done simply because the actual tracking for that was being done on the DiggBar itself, and without counting clicks from unregistered Digg users (who will no longer be seeing the DiggBar) the number was no longer accurate. The company has undoubtedly been tracking the number of outgoing clicks a story gets for years (albeit internally), but did not design the view count to feed from that metric. I, for one found it one of the most useful features, since you could see how many views a story had received, regardless of the number of Diggs it had.
