Sometime today, according to BusinessWeek, social news site Digg will launch a slew of new social networking features that will put the site in closer competition with services like Facebook and MySpace. The features will enable easier communication between diggers and allow them to form groups based around their interests. "This is really the first time that we have enabled communications between users," Digg founder Kevin Rose told BusinessWeek.
The reason for the change, implies BusinessWeek's Catherine Holahan, is that as Digg has expanded its reach beyond technology focused stories, its early users have complained that the main page has become diluted with news in topics that don't matter to them. The new features will allow users to form connections and share stories with people that have common interests.
"Instead of submitting stories for review by the larger Digg community, users will be able to send -- 'shout' in Digg terms -- story links along with messages to particular Digg friends. Friends, or small groups of friends, also will be able to chat or discuss stories on their personal pages with posts to a message board, a feature akin to the 'wall' on Facebook." -- Catherine Holahan, BusinessWeek
Image from BusinessWeek.
Digg's new profile pages will include expanded information about users. Users will be able to shares multiple photos -- rather than just one small thumbnail avatar -- lists of interests, expanded bio info, and links to blogs and social networking profiles. Like Facebook, users will have finely tuned privacy controls that will let them dictate who can see the information they share on their profiles.
As BusinessWeek notes, the new social features could be a boon for Microsoft, who signed a multi-year ad deal with Digg earlier this year. Users sharing more personal information means better targeting of ads and potentially higher ad rates. Digg hopes that the new features will also attract more registered users -- currently only 15-20% of the site's 20 million monthly unique users are registered.
Digg has a history of eliciting very passionate responses from its users when making changes to the site or enforcing rules. It will be interesting to see how users react to this latest round of changes to the site. To their credit, Digg has always realized that their site relies upon the happiness of its users and has a reputation of being responsive to their requests. To that end, BusinessWeek is also reporting that Digg plans to debut a long awaited Images section next month.
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Sometime today, according to BusinessWeek, social news site Digg will launch a slew of new social networking features that will put the site in closer competition with services like Facebook and MySpace. Read More
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Sounds like a good move. The spammers can make their own spammer groups.
Sphunn here:
Posted by: Matt Jones | September 19, 2007 6:09 AMhttp://sphinn.com/story/6102
I like this move a lot...Digg's fanbase will definitely love this one.
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Posted by: Michael Vu | September 19, 2007 6:51 AMSounds like a move in the right direction!
Posted by: A Garcia | September 19, 2007 6:53 AMShould absolutely increase pageviews and lock-in effect for core demographic, which should be good for advertisers. Perhaps they've gone back to focusing on their core userbase, which is a good thing, as they haven't been that successful in making the site more appealing to a huge group of more mainstream users.
Posted by: ted | September 19, 2007 7:52 AMSome interesting changes on Digg's part. One thing they still need to fix. Their users. Not all of them, but there's a good many time wasters.
Posted by: Website Design | September 19, 2007 9:01 AMMaybe this is what could have saved Netscape.
Still waiting for the Picture Section - why is it taking so long
Posted by: Search◊ Engines WEB | September 19, 2007 9:39 AMthe new site mixx.com just launched, and they have pictures, and a personalized home page and private groups. In other words, they have all that Digg has without the annoying users who bury anything that isn't about iPhone or XBox.
Posted by: Edith | September 19, 2007 10:16 PMI have to disagree with the with people thinking its a good idea.
Heres what I think.
1. People surf digg on their own and don't really go there to see what their friends are digging
2. Digg are running out of ideas and this is a off the shelf idea. My mum could of come up with this idea.
3. Digg sign up numbers are slowing and they are hoping this can reverse it long enough to get rid of it.
I think People are starting to realise digg is nothing special its just like a large forum where people post cool stuff. They need to sell up soon.
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