ReadWriteWeb

Later today, Digg will open up its rumored read/write API. Up until now, developers could only read data from Digg. With the new API, web and desktop apps will also be able to contribute data to Digg. This will allow developers to write desktop and web applications that enable users to, for example, interact with Digg without having to go to the site. Digg will use the OAuth protocol to authorize applications. According to Forbes' Taylor Buley, however, the writable API will not allow users to submit stories remotely.

Specialized mobile search engine Taptu and real-time search service OneRiot have teamed up to launch a new real-time search engine for mobile. With the touch-friendly interface provided by Taptu, you can now perform searches from your mobile phone and receive real-time results from sites like Twitter and Digg. In addition, you can browse through the trending topics to see what recent events are currently being buzzed about.

A great community for crowd sourced news and content, Digg is taking a page from the Twitter playbook and testing its mettle in the real-time stream. Similar to Twitter's Trending Topics, Digg is set to launch Digg Trends. According to a company blog post , the bookmarking community is offering users a chance to view trending stories before they make it to the home page. True to Digg fashion, this public view of the trend firehose comes with a catch. Voters have 10 minutes to digg or bury a story in order to determine whether it occupies valuable homepage real estate.

In a bit of "gotcha" journalism, interviewers Arnt Eriksen and Thomas Moen got Digg founder Kevin Rose to confirm that his company is developing an application for the iPhone.

When Eriksen referred to having seen a sneak preview of the application, Rose was visibly surprised. "I cannot show that off yet. You're not even supposed to know about that... Nobody knows about that." A video of the interview is embedded below.

In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup - our newsletter summarizing the top stories of the week - we analyze the impact of real-time information on the Web, investigate 'web squared' (when web 2.0 meets Internet of Things), tell you why cloud computing is the future of mobile, look at Delicious' new Twitter re-design, check out Digg's read/write API plans, and more. We also check in on our two new channels: ReadWriteEnterprise (devoted to 'enterprise 2.0' trends and products) and ReadWriteStart (dedicated to profiling startups and entrepreneurs).

In today's blog post by Chief Strategy Officer Mike Maser, Digg announced that it will be rolling out its beta ad program later this week. In addition to the community's existing banner ads, the company is launching an initial set of ads to appear in rotation with regular content. From here, users will interact with the ads in the same way they interact with articles - by digging, burying and commenting on them. Advertising with a high number of Diggs will fetch lower ad revenue and buried advertisers will be charged more.

According to news posted this morning to API-tracking website ProgrammableWeb, the social news community at Digg.com may be on the verge of opening up. In a recent message shared on the Digg mailing list, developer Jeff Hodsdon announced that the forthcoming Digg API will allow people to "not only read data, but also contribute data, too." In other words, a Read/Write API.

The implications of this decision are huge. Whereas before Digg was the place to find and share interesting links from around the web, that role has, as of late, been taken on by microblogging site Twitter.com. To combat Twitter's threat, Digg has tried launching new features like the DiggBar and their own URL-shortening service, but nothing they've done so far could have as big an impact on their future as the new API.

At the recent Real-Time CrunchUp 2009, Khris Loux, CEO of one of the web's largest commenting services, announced the
"death of the comment". This declaration was extremely significant as Loux's JS-Kit is currently installed on over 600,000 sites. He blames the death on social media sites like Twitter and Flickr and the rise of "parallel channels away from [the] product". In essence, dialogue has moved from a singular destination to a series of parallel but separate social networking channels.

A new service called Sub.DiggerPlus vastly improves the user experience for social news mega-site Digg and its social networking features. The service shows a Digg user's friends' link submissions in an attractive slideshow of live pages inside a frame. Digg's own view of friends' submissions is cluttered with extra pageviews and not a lot of fun to use. Sub.DiggerPlus could make users want to make more friends and increase small group engagement with Digg, something the social networking feature of the site has always aimed for but never really delivered. So what's the catch?

Blog-indexing service Spinn3r announced today that for their new 3.1 release, they will offer support for the Twitter firehose - that's right, the entire public Twitter stream - as well as social media rankings.

The Twitter firehose feed content will belong to a new microblog designation that Spinn3r will also use for indexing other microblogging services. The rankings will consider the relationships and links between users and determine the top 10,000 accounts over four social and link-sharing networks.

At a Digg townhall meeting earlier this month, Digg's founder, Kevin Rose, and CEO, Jay Adelson, announced that Digg's shout feature would be removed sometime this week and replaced with a share feature. This change just went live on the popular social media site. Users on Digg used to be able to share stories on Digg with other users right on the site, a feature that was often abused. Now, Digg's users can only email stories, or share them on Facebook and Twitter.

During Digg's Townhall (embedded below) this evening, founder Kevin Rose and CEO Jay Adelson announced that the shout feature on Digg will be removed later this week to be replaced with a new share option that will "streamline your ability to share on Facebook and Twitter."

According to an e-mail from Digg tonight, it will likely happen Thursday. "We've elected to remove shouts in favor of more popular sharing options, based on user feedback and broader market research," a Digg spokesperson told us. The new share feature will also include an e-mail option.

Current real-time search engines generally focus on just searching a single service - and typically, that service is Twitter. Scoopler, however, a Y Combinater-funded startup which launched today after a short private beta, goes far beyond that. Scoopler is a real-time meta-search tool for Twitter, Flickr, Digg, and Delicious, with support for more services to follow in the future. As one would expect, search results from Twitter dominate the real-time stream, though, depending on the topic, the most interesting links often come from delicious or digg.

Digg, which has spent four years trying to level the playing field and democratize media, will soon receive a facelift. According to Kevin Rose, Digg's founder and chief architect, the site, which hasn't changed much since its inception, will be putting a "stake in the ground this year and making some big changes."

Speaking to the Ad:Tech audience in San Francisco today, Rose talked about Digg's future saying ads need to be more interactive, print can't be saved, online publishers are in an incredible position and the importance of power users may be underestimated.

Update: Digg starts rolliing out its own ads

Any good webmaster knows the cardinal rules of website optimization. Yahoo! wrote them all up years ago on its Developer Network site. And the more of these rules you can adhere to, the faster your site will load for your visitors. But, more and more often as sites turn to using asynchronous technologies like AJAX to make their sites more responsive and act more like applications, the old rules lose their effectiveness.

Today, the website wizards behind Digg have revealed a new technology called MXHR, or Multi-Part XML HTTP Requests, as a method for optimizing delivery of Digg's complex AJAX-enhanced site. The implementation of MXHR is an addition to Digg's User Interface Library, called DUI.Stream. While still in a fairly rough early stage, Digg believes that MXHR will eventually give it a huge boost in un-cached page rendering efficiency.

While we liked Digg's new DiggBar for its features, its release also created quite an uproar in the SEO community. Now, Digg has announced that it will change the way the DiggBar works, which should pacify a lot of Digg's critics. Among other things, the DiggBar will now only appear when users are logged in to Digg, so that content providers will continue to receive full credit from search engines, without Digg's iframe getting in the way. Digg will roll these changes out over the next week or so.

Last week, Danny Sullivan, editor-in-chief of Search Engine Land, coined the term Digggate in response to concerns of a potential scandal surrounding Digg, Google and the Diggbar. According to Sullivan, Digg is deliberately skirting issues surrounding the new Diggbar and consequently confusing and potentially misleading citizens of the Web.

Andy Sorcini, long time Digg user and social media enthusiast disagrees. "I honestly don't believe that the Diggbar was conceived with any maliciousness toward stealing content producers link juice. I think the idea was to drive traffic to Digg, while at the same time facilitate access to Digg services from content producers sites."

So, is the new Diggbar evil or will it be remembered as one of Digg's finest moments?

For discovering new content and participating in an active community, Digg is awesome. But, everyone who has used the service for a while knows that Digg search has been mediocre at best, returning different results from one day to the next. All that has changed today with the just-announced Digg Search overhaul. Designed by (in Kevin's words) pretty bad ass engineers, the new search takes in to account a lot of under-the-hood Digg mechanics when selecting what results to show you, while simultaneously improving the user interface and usability.

And we have a bookmarklet that makes it even better!

Digg, the popular social news site, just launched its long awaited DiggBar, a new toolbar that will appear on any page Digg links to. From within the toolbar, users can digg stories and share them with their friends on Twitter and Facebook. Digg will now also feature shortened URLs, and, maybe even more interestingly, Digg now also displays how many times a story has been clicked through from Digg.

In addition, the new toolbar will allow users to see other stories on Digg from the same source, as well as related stories. Users will also be able to see some comments directly from the toolbar, though this is currently restricted to the latest, most controversial, and the most popular comments.

Some of us know what hitting the front page of Digg can do: send 20,000 - 200,000+ clicks through to a site. Some of us have even felt the blessing (or curse, depending on how you look at it) of the Digg Effect. But how much do you know about integrating social media, specifically Digg, into your site, and what the benefits of doing so can bring to publishers?

Bob Buch, VP of business development for Digg spoke at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco today and explained that if you want successful social media integration, you need to think chocolate chip cookies. "Much like social media, choc chip cookies are made up of five key ingredients," he explained, "and if you want to succeed, you need to know what those ingredients are."