ReadWriteWeb

Digg just announced the availability of a new streaming real-time Application Programming Interface (API) for all submissions, Diggs and comments on the site. Modeled after the Twitter Streaming API, Digg elected to use Tornado, the real-time framework built by FriendFeed and open sourced by Facebook, and Redis to power the API.

Will developers go for it? Though Digg's currency appears to be dropping fast, real-time streaming data from millions (?) of social media users, concerning links to content from all around the Web, has got to hold some interest for programatic analysis, UI innovation and publishing industry analytics. The flow of data coming through the API seems a little anemic, though. We spoke with some of the Web's leading data developers who see today's announcement in very different ways.

Yesterday, Digg power user LtGenPanda spotted some rather odd activity on the social bookmarking site. While looking into how the new Digg algorithm changed the makeup of the site's front page, he noticed that sites that a number of new sites that never made the front page before were suddenly very prominent on Digg. After further investigation, LtGenPanda spotted a group of 159 suspicious users with names like 'dd1' and 'diggerz29' that were systematically digging stories from major sites - either by hand or algorithmically. Once he made Digg aware of these accounts, these users' activity stopped immediately.

While social news site Digg is struggling these days, quieter competitor Reddit is still going strong. Co-founder Steve Huffman, who sold the site for millions to publishing company Conde Nast four years ago this month, now says he wishes he still owned the site.

In an interview yesterday on the podcast Mixergy (which is highly recommended, by the way), Huffman told host Andrew Warner "I wish I still owned Reddit now". He recognizes, though, that the economic climate between now and then may have required the umbrella of Conde Nast in order for Reddit to have thrived. It's an interesting discussion about decisions, history and independence - for once regarding a startup that wasn't suffocated after acquisition.

Guest author Donald Draper is an occasional contributor to ReadWriteWeb.

Recently, I ended a long relationship with Digg.com. And I'm relieved.

For a time, Digg was glorious. For sharing great content, it was the only game in town, and it felt like the future. And whenever outside forces threatened its existence, fears were quickly squashed with reassurances and shows of support from Mr. Kevin Rose. Most of you will remember the infamous Digg This: 09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63-56-88-c0. Those days, Digg was shaping the future of the Web.

Rose once said, "We'd rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company." But a "bigger company" turned out to be the least of its problems.

At TechCrunch's Disrupt conference, Digg's founder Kevin Rose presented a very candid view of the current state of Digg during an interview with TechCrunch founder Mike Arrington. Rose admitted that he and the rest of the team made mistakes when they launched Digg v4. He admitted that Digg's traffic took quite a dip after the launch of v4. Looking back. Rose also pointed out that Digg once got an acquisition offer for close to $80 million ($60 million plus earnout) during the site's heyday. While he was personally willing to take this offer, the Digg board decided to turn it down.

The launch of Digg's redesign will likely go down in the history of social media as a textbook example for how to alienate your users. Over the last few weeks we have chronicled the demise of the Digg community in great detail, but thanks to the latest data from Hitwise, we now have some hard facts about the current state of Digg. At its peak, Digg had over 40 million unique visitors every month. Since the launch of the redesign, Digg's traffic has been in free fall, though. Traffic from visitors in the U.S. has declined 26% since the redesign went live.

The Internet was in flames last week as popular social news curation site Digg.com launched the latest iteration of its platform, unleashing a groundswell of outrage and protest from a majority of the site's loyal users. A week later, Digg has begun to respond to its passionate community, making rapid changes and bug fixes as its exhausted back-end infrastructure struggles to keep up. Today I spoke with Digg's VP of Product Keval Desai about the launch, the company's reaction to the negativity from its community and how it intends to move forward into the future.

Controversial social news site Digg has hired Amazon.com's Matt Williams to be its new CEO, according to a scoop by TechCrunch this morning.

Williams has more than a decade of experience in online eCommerce and small business services, but little discoverable social media participation. He'll take the helm of a site that was groundbreaking just a few short years ago, still drives more traffic than any other technology news aggregator, but struggles to remain relevant as larger, more general interest ways to share and discover news have arisen.

Digg's users are still in the middle of their fifth major revolt on the site and the effect of this current uprising is now starting to become more apparent. According to the latest data from Statcounter, referral traffic from Digg to its network hit its lowest point ever on Monday, while traffic from Digg competitor Reddit increased dramatically. Statcounter's CEO Aodhan Cullen notes that "Abandon Digg Day" on Monday turned out to be a "Redd Monday" for Reddit.

Reddit has taken over the front page of Digg. If Kevin Rose and the rest of the Digg team thought that a long weekend would be enough to calm the furor over the latest changes to the popular site, they were clearly mistaken. Not only did Digg's users declare today "quit Digg day," but in order to protest Digg's new auto-submission system, users are now upvoting every Reddit story on the site. These stories are being submitted to Digg by Reddit itself through the new auto-submission system that is a core part of Digg v4.