Killing the Toolbar

According to Rose, the Digg toolbar is simply not worth the trouble. According to him, the iFrame "causes confusion when bookmarking, breaks w/iFrame busters, and has no ability to communicate with the lower frame (if you browse away from a story, the old digg count still persists)." Framing content, says Rose, "is bad for the Internet," something critics pointed out to Digg when the company first launched this feature.

We should note that it's not clear if Digg will continue to use its URL shortener for these links.

Unbanning Banned Domains

In addition to killing the DiggBar, Digg will also unban all previously banned domains. Besides filtering malware sites and other sites that violate Digg's TOS, "no other restrictions will be placed on content." It's not quite clear how many URLs are currently banned by Digg, but here is a list of some of the more well-known sites that users can't currently submit to Digg. Unbanning a lot of these sites makes a lot of sense for Digg, especially if it plans to keep the focus on personalized recommendations the company's former CEO Jay Adelson outlined last month.

For more details about the 'Diggate' controversy, have a look at our earlier coverage of the DiggBar's implications with regards to SEO and copyright.

Lots of Activity on the DiggBar

Digg also announced that an astonishing 45% of all the activity on Digg is now happening on the DiggBar, and 25% of all DiggBar users are using the toolbar to discover new content by looking at related stories. According to John Quinn, only a very small number of Digg users have disabled the toolbar.

The below graph shows minutes spent on site. Once again it's sorry reading for digg, which is trending downwards while Buzz goes up.

Finally, here are charts showing that Buzz is almost identical to the mainstream men/women Internet split, while digg users are 61% men.

Reading through the comments, it appears that a lot of external (and even some internal?) diggs are being redirected to this page. As I write this, the story has 46 diggs and comments indicating 6 sites (not including Center Networks) that are apparently unknowingly sending diggers its way. The story is 348 days old, but the comments are all within the past couple of hours. Bug? Hack? Who knows... it sure is odd, though.

Does anyone have any info on this? Is this something you've seen before? Leave a comment below.

Update: Turns out it was a bug. From Digg programmer Steve Williams: "We're aware of this problem, and we're working on it. I believe the digg buttons are working correctly now, but we're still looking for the root cause. It wasn't a hack." (via the Digg page for this post)

Digg is partnering with CNN's iReport on this. Diggers will be able to either submit their questions in writing through the Dialogg page or they can upload a video to iReport. According to Digg, they will ask the top rated questions, but given the often rowdy nature of Digg, it will be interesting to see if the questions will be censored in any way and how the Digg users would react if that happened.

As Digg's CEO Jay Adelson announced last week, Digg will have a substantial presence at the Democratic and the Republican conventions. Giving Digg's users at least some influence over the reporting from there falls right in place with Digg's overall style.

Not New - But Still a Good Thing

Overall, there is, of course, little that is new about this style of doing interviews, which is quite similar to the YouTube debates. Even Slashdot, Digg's virtual grandfather, often uses it to decide on interview question. At the same time though, anything to get young people interested in politics is a good thing in our opinion and Digg definitely has the ability to reach a lot of folks who would otherwise not be interested in the political process. Also, given that Digg, at its core, is still a technology site, its users are likely to ask a lot of tech oriented questions that a lot of the politicians probably never thought about much.

Looking at the top rated questions so far, net neutrality is ranking high above legalizing marijuana and repealing the Patriot Act.

Maybe one of the most interesting features of these sub-diggs will be that those users who manage them will be able to control how and when newly submitted stories will be promoted to the front page.

For Digg's competitors like Reddit and Mixx, the sub-sites have definitely been a success. At reddit, which is arguable a lot smaller than Digg, the more popular sub-reddits can have between 3000 to 20,000 subscribers.

As social news sites like Digg grow in popularity, a lot of their early, hardcore constituents can often feel pushed to the sidelines by the more mainstream users who start using the site over time. With these sub-sites, these users can still make the site their home and take control over their experience again.

Competing with the Real-Time Web

As our own Sarah Perez pointed out earlier this year, a full read/write API would allow Digg to compete with the real-time Web. To do this, Digg doesn't really need to enable users to submit stories remotely. What Digg really needs is a way to get more users to vote for stories more often.

Currently, it can take hours - and sometimes days - before a story appears on Digg, while services like Tweetmeme can pick up trends and breaking news stories on Twitter within minutes. To pick up speed, Digg needs to get its voting mechanism into more places - and the new API would allow the company to do just that.

To share stories, users can now hover over the 'share' link on the digg homepage and select the service they want to share the stories on (email, Facebook, or Twitter). Digg also removed the 'blog this' feature, which, according to Digg's Jen Burton only saw really low usage.

For a more detailed discussion of the pros and cons of shouts on Digg, please see our earlier report from last week.

Reddit may have a jump on Digg when it comes to avoiding groupthink and spam, via a user reputation system it calls 'karma'. Check out the full story on ZDNet and tell me what you think: is Reddit's karma system a better - more honest - way to rank stories and users than Digg's populist approach of ranking by homepage hits? Or do you think Digg has the right approach, but just needs to address the groupthink and spam issues that come with scaling to thousands of users?

The email notifications will now give you more information about the people you follow, specifically when they comment or Digg a story you've already taken action on. And the on-site notifications will give a little broadcast icon next to your profile image. Clicking on the icon will give you a drop-down with the five most recent notifications.

You might want to adjust your settings if you're an avid Digg user and/or you have a lot of followers, as the default settings may mean you get a lot of email.

Digg says it is considering some additional updates, including notifications when a story you submit gains a certain number of Diggs or when someone you follow submits a story. But Digg is looking for feedback before making any more changes, which considering some of the dust-up surrounding its recent changes, is probably a good thing.

Asked about the departure of Digg's former CEO Jay Adelson, Rose didn't go into details, but noted that "Jay was ready for something new and so were we." For himself, though, the role of Digg's CEO was not something he "wanted to take on." Rose also noted that he wasn't around at Digg much during the months before the departure of Adelson as the service's CEO. He pointed out that he likes to roll features out, but as the backlog of new features at Digg grew and Digg focused more on revenue-producing features than user-facing features, he grew restless. During that time, too, Rose thought that moving engineers to revenue-producing features instead of giving users a new experience was a mistake. Without new features, a lot of Digg's users grew restless and moved on to other services.

"Big and Bold and New"

Talking about the launch of Digg v4, Rose pointed out that the company had to focus on user-focused features again as development of the site had stagnated for too long. To stand apart from Facebook and Twitter - which Rose admits are taking traffic away from Digg - the company had to do something "big and bold and new."

Talking about the mistakes Digg made during the relaunch, Rose admitted that the team made a lot of mistakes. As an example, he noted that the Digg team shouldn't have made the personalized news view the default.

Will Kevin Rose Leave Digg Soon?

Asked about his own future at Digg, Rose wouldn't go into details, but said that he was getting "burned out" and wouldn't say that he would still be at Digg by the end of the year. Rose is clearly very interested in continuing his work as an angel investor - something he seemed far more passionate about than Digg during today's interview - so we wouldn't be surprised if he left Digg at some point in the near future to pursue this.

On the 'Submit' page, it states:

"Cost: $20, plus $1 per Digg.

After completing the form below, you will be taken to PayPal. Once your PayPal payment is received, your Digg submission will be given to User/Submitter users to promote on Digg.com.

User/Submitter users are then given the chance to digg your submission and other stories for $0.50. After your submission has reached your desired number of diggs, you will be emailed a report.

We cannot guarantee that your submissions will hit the front page of Digg. We reserve the right to reject or cancel any submission for any reason.

If User/Submitter is unable to fulfill your requested number of verified diggs within 48 hours, you will be refunded the amount of Diggs paid for but not received within 5 working days.

All User/Submitter transactions are private."

And on the 'User' page it has a registration form, plus a note: "Pay-out: $0.50 per Digg."

No word on how many users they have right now, but looks like it set up shop just recently. I seriously doubt it will work anyway.

If we compare this data though to official registered user stats from digg and Facebook, the story is very different. When Facebook announced their platform, it was revealed that they have 24 million "active" users. The most recent digg stats I could find were from a Kevin Rose blog post on 7 March 2007, in which he announced that Digg had just reached one million registered users. So while the Facebook data seems to correlate with Compete (approximately 1 unique visitor for each registered user), digg's data is much different. If Compete's data is accurate, then that means there are 22 unique visitors to each registered digg user. Which suggests that by far the majority of digg's users are not registered users.

Also, if you look at the growth patterns according to Compete's data, it is quite extraordinary:

Source: Compete

I find it all hard to believe - not only that digg has 22 Million monthly unique visitors, but also that they have more monthly unique visitors than Facebook. digg is still a very techie user base, whereas Facebook is seemingly far more mainstream. Or is it?

The above graph says that digg grew 1400% in unique visitors over the past year. That is hard data - and if we accept it is true, then the conclusion is that digg has succeeded in going mainstream. Remember that was digg's stated aim when it expanded beyond Technology stories in June 2006. Yes, one year ago. So has digg actually grown by 1400% in a year, since it expanded its content focus beyond tech? The Compete data suggests it has.

What do you make of this data? Is digg really more popular than Facebook?

It needs to be said, though, that Facebook's user base has exploded over the last year, while Digg's traffic 'only' grew by about 50% according to Compete. During its fifth year, Facebook's traffic more than doubled from about 28 million visitors to over 73 million.

As Jay Meattle points out in his guest post for Compete, Digg will have to come up with something very special if it wants to continue to match Facebook's growth.

Can Digg Become Mainstream?

In a way, though, comparing Digg to Facebook isn't even necessarily fair, as they provide two completely different services, but in terms of the users they want to reach, both have very similar aspirations. For now, Digg, however, hasn't been able to break into the mainstream (even though Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht made an appearance on Jimmy Fallon last week), while there is a good chance that even your mother is now joining Facebook. If Digg wants to continue its growth, it will have to find a way to attract more mainstream users without alienating its base.

With these changes, the strength of using the available search result-generated RSS feeds has also improved. Now, you have greater flexibility to get just the items you are interested in from in a search result, and consequently, in your feed reader. If you are an information junkie like we are, you know that leveraging some time getting the perfect search result locked in to an RSS feed is huge, and it can make the difference between continuously sifting through noise and every story being one that is important to you.

Frankly, we think Digg's work on search is simply tremendous. Although it does not rely on search to remain immensely popular, its now leverages that popularity to return results that are relevant and useful sliced any number of different ways. A great job on a core part of Digg's infrastructure that has been overlooked for too long.