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Once a company gains widespread popularity, scaling is often its biggest problem. Public familiarity with the Twitter Fail Whale is our proof. To keep up with the pace of demand, many companies including Twitter have found unique and inexpensive ways to manage consumers transactions. One such solution, Puppet, just earned Reductive Labs a $2 million dollar Series A round with True Ventures.

The internet has settled a great number of disputes in my household. The star of Ferris Bueller's Day Off is NOT John Cusack, George W. Bush is NOT older than Mick Jagger, and the chorus for Here Comes the Hotstepper is NOT "Word Em Up". For this reason I was excited to hear that social gambling site Flusta launched to offer a dispute settlement platform.

Similar to online competition site Strutta user votes are tallied to determine the winner of a particular competition. However, while Strutta gives users the option to vote on a variety of videos, Flusta is based on binary oppositions.

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.

Only four years after he quit his job and started The Sartorialist, fashion blogger Scott Schuman writes a monthly column for GQ, has been honored by Time Magazine, and more importantly, has gained the adoration and respect of millions of bleeding edge hipsters. Schuman's photography has inspired legions of salivating indie fashion fanatics, and many who've witnessed the mainstream outing of street fashion covet the simpler and less-ostentatious times. Yes folks, someone let the clowns on the bus and now wherever fashion goes, it looks like a drunk circus. Lookbook.nu is one site re-establishing exclusivity and celebrating fashion insiders.

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.