Rebuilt Digg to launch later this week
After its buyout by Betaworks just a few weeks ago, a completely redesigned-from-scratch Digg will launch later this week.
After its buyout by Betaworks just a few weeks ago, a completely redesigned-from-scratch Digg will launch later this week.
Billed "Digg v1", the site redesign is aimed at helping people find, read and share stories, in the hope of lifting the once-great site's flagging traffic.
According to Digg's blog Rethink Digg, the new site design, which is due to launch at an unspecified time later this week, is focused on four key goals:
We make it easy to find, read and share the most interesting and talked about stories on the internet right now
The experience must be fast and thin. Let users go, and they will come back to you. We optimise for return visits, not page views per visit
Build an experience that is native to each device: smartphone, inbox, web page. Stories must find the user, wherever they are
Users must be able to share where they and their friends already are — on networks like Facebook, Twitter and email.
With this in mind, the new Digg will be much more image-friendly, ad-free and easy to navigate, with features like the Newsrooms and the Newsbar disappearing entirely. Instead, there will be three central sections: Upcoming, Popular and Top Stories.
But what about commenting? Well, Betaworks isn't quite ready to go there yet.
At launch, v1 will not include a commenting system. When Digg was founded in 2004, it was one of the only places on the web to have a conversation with like-minded people. Today, conversations happen everywhere, and the problem that Digg started to solve in 2004 now has no shortage of solutions. We knew that if we were going to support commenting at launch, we had to do it right, and we knew that we couldn't do it right in six weeks. In the coming weeks, we will conduct a few experiments in commenting that will inform more permanent features.
The voting system, Betaworks hopes, will also be more democratic after the discontent that arose when vote-selling became publicly known. The new Digg will integrate Facebook and Twitter into its voting system; that is, every Tweet and Facebook share will count towards a story's Digg score.
For more information about the redesign, visit Rethink Digg.