The new Digg to relaunch in August after total rebuild
Digg's new owners say they're rewriting the site from scratch, and will have a brand-new version of it up by August 1.
Betaworks, the company that acquired the remaining parts of Digg.com, says it will have a brand-new version of the social-news site up and running in less than two weeks.
In a blog post today, the 10-person team offered a brief primer on its plans to rebuild the site, as well as more detail on why Betaworks purchased Digg in the first place.
"We acquired Digg because we all need a product to help [us] find, read, and understand what the Internet is talking about right now," the company wrote, adding that Digg once "represented the messiness of the Internet at its best."
Betaworks says that part of bringing Digg back to that state involves "rebuilding it from scratch," which the company is currently in the process of doing.
"The old Digg infrastructure was expensive and it afforded us little latitude to innovate and build at a fast clip," the company said. "So four weeks ago, we set an aggressive goal to move to a new infrastructure by August 1. We are starting with a fresh code base -- it's modern, it's fast, and it's shiny and new."
Betaworks, which owns and operates link shortener Bit.ly, along with Chartbeat and Bloglovin' (among others), purchased the remaining parts of Digg on July 12. Digg's engineering team, which had built and maintained the project, were sold off to Washington Post Company-owned SocialCode in May.
Of note, Betaworks says it won't make money on Digg, at least at first. Instead, the company says it's focusing on the user experience before a business model.
"We have little time and fewer resources to focus on anything but the user, who is our first, second, and third priority," the company said.