ReadWriteWeb

Last week, we wrote about the virtual user rebellion over at social organization site Meetup. The site had unleashed a drastic redesign that many users said they never saw coming and these selfsame users came out in droves to complain in the site's feedback forum. In less than 24 hours, nearly 4,000 users came out to vote that the site "give organizers the ability to restore the old format."

While the company hasn't completely rolled back the redesign, it has come out with a blog post explaining the changes, apologizing and vowing to fix them.

Whenever a company makes a big change to its layout, there are likely to be some complaints. You can't make everybody happy all the time, right?

Well, social organization site Meetup plopped down a redesign that it's calling "New Meetup" and its users have come out in droves to ask for the "Old Meetup" back.

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.

Flickr, the Yahoo-owned photo sharing site, has unveiled a redesigned site today that puts new emphasis on photos and all of the extra data - and the stories they tell - hidden inside of them.

The site had been in testing since mid-June by more than 800,000 members, but now the final version is available to all.

Regator, the human-curated blog directory and news aggregator, just relaunched with a vastly improved and easier to use design, an improved search engine, and tight integration with Facebook Connect and Delicious. Regator's mission is to aggregate the best content from blogs across over 500 categories. To do so, Regator's editors created a vast directory of the best blogs on the Internet, with topics ranging from tech news and politics to tourism and beekeeping. The service's algorithms then create front pages for every topic that includes the most popular and interesting articles from these blogs, as well as an index of related posts and lists of trending topics.

YouTube comment threads aren't exactly known for offering highly intellectual discussions. Today, however, YouTube is introducing a new experiment that is meant to highlight the best comments on any video. This experiment will offer a "highlights view" of comments that shows the top rated comments and comments from the uploader at the top of every comment thread.

Last night, during Digg's annual SXSW party, Digg's CEO Jay Adelson announced a set of significant changes to Digg. Among the changes Adelson announced are a streamlined submission process, a personalized homepage, an unlimited amount of topic pages, a new commenting system and better curation tools. Earlier this morning, we got a chance to sit down with Adelson to discuss these changes in greater detail. Some of these changes will surely be extremely controversial in the Digg community and might also make some publishers who rely on Digg's traffic a bit nervous.

YouTube is continuing with what it's calling "one of the biggest redesigns in YouTube history" and today it wants to point out some of its new, shiny features. The streaming video site first offered its users a sneak peek last month and it says it's been listening to feedback and it now has three new features it wants to show off.

Web technology that replicates clunky, analog methods for organizing and interacting with information is a terrible practice and we're glad to see one more example of it departing the Internet with LinkedIn's new address book functionality hitting the site today.

While still in beta, the new function looks like a leap ahead of the old Rolodex-style functionality we've become used to never using.

Microsoft just announced a radical redesign of its MSN homepage. Today's MSN homepage for the US market is a busy mix of ads, hundreds of links and some customizable local news and weather widgets. The redesign, which is MSN's first major redesign since 2004, puts a new emphasis on search, local news, video and integration with social networks. The new page features more white space, a tabbed design and a new MSN logo.