The Upcoming section, as we noted yesterday, is where many of Digg's most loyal users spent time attempting to influence which stories would make the front page. Many complaints focused around the removal of this section, which Rose says accounts for less than half of a percent of site traffic. "I definitely see the fun behind wanting to see stories just before they jump, so we'll add a view of upcoming popular stories soon," he says.

Another change that angered many users was that the site defaulted to the new "My News" section, which is populated with stories submitted, commented on and dugg by a user's friends and contacts. This caused many long-time Digg users to accuse the site of "becoming too much like Facebook and Twitter." Rose says the default homepage will soon become toggleable between My News and Top News, stating simply, "Makes sense, we'll add this setting."

The social My News section has been the focus of the relaunch and Rose is probably disappointed Digg users weren't more accepting of the feature. While it certainly, "makes sense" to make the default homepage an interchangeable setting, it wasn't what he wanted, or it would have been included from the start.

What's NOT Changing

There are a few areas where Rose is refusing to bow to pressure from the site's users. Many were disappointed that the ability to "bury" stories was removed in the latest version, and argue it eliminates their ability to keep bad stories from the front pages of the site. Rose argues that "by removing the bury button we have put a stop to the bury brigades," and notes that users can report malicious content by clicking a "hide" button near each story.

Another change that has irked many users are the up- and down-voting buttons on comments, which were changed to arrows from their previous thumb versions. It's a minor change, but it means a lot in the Digg community, especially when arrows are used on many other sites, including the Reddit community.

Rose seemingly brushed this issue away, making a reference to the popular Old Spice advertisements. "Look at v3, now back again, the arrows are now diamonds," he writes. Nope, they're still arrows. Personally I could care less if they're arrows or thumbs, but the community at large seems to care a great deal, so it seems like a no-brainer.

Is It Enough?

There are still many lingering concerns for fans of Digg. While many contend that the new Digg plays into the hands of popular mainstream media outlets (the same outlets Digg was originally designed to circumvent) and takes away power from individual submitters and smaller sites, Rose says that all diggers are created equal.

But will these changes be enough to appease the Digg community? Early responses have been mixed, with a leaning toward positive, but time will tell whether the users choose to meet Rose in the middle. Let us know how you feel about the changes and the fixes to the new Digg by leaving us a comment below!

Photo by Joi Ito

So what are they so angry about? There are a few major issues, but the majority of it boils down to the fact that some features present in the old Digg have either been removed or altered.

The Bury Button - As long as users have been able to digg the good stories, they've been able to bury the bad ones. Digg v4 has done away with burying. Stories can now only be dugg, commented on or saved. Luckily for Digg, this isn't a hard fix if they so choose to make it. Of the over 2,000 comments yesterday's story received on Digg, the third most dugg comment is simply, "Where's my bury button???"

Upcoming - Many of Digg's loyal users are sorely missing the "Upcoming Stores" section which was found in each category of the site. Digg 4 now only features "Top News" within each topic, but these only include stories which have already broken through with hundreds of diggs.

Many users enjoyed lingering in the Upcoming section to be among early commenters and to help curate which stories made the front page. Now it is almost impossible to find a story within the "Top News" tab with less than a few hundred diggs already to its name. The new "My News" section could be what Digg intends to be a replacement, but this only features stories dugg or commented on by your friends and followers - something users of the old site aren't exactly thrilled with.

Design and Layout - Some are even displeased with the overall look and feel of the site. Some complain the color scheme lost a lot green and now resembles Facebook's pale blue tones. On a more practical note, Digg has moved away from pagination to an in-page "Load More" button. This has angered some users because refreshing the page will cause one to lose their place in the pagination. Not everyone, it seems, is a fan of opening links in a new browser tab.

What Now?

Frequent users of Digg seem most upset by the disruption to their normal routine on the site. Whether it's pagination, upcoming stories, bury buttons or even things like being able to view stories submitted by a specific user - the new Digg has clearly displaced and upset a large segment of its user base.

Digg is now between a rock and hard place - sticking with their instincts and trying to force some new methods on its users, or bowing to pressure and bringing features back. Will they choose to make their users happy, or will they keep the new features, which have been aimed to help publishers?

The future of Digg will certainly be an interesting one to follow. For more interesting opinions on this issue, check out Alex Whilhem's post at The Next Web, and Allen Stern's article at CenterNetworks.

12seconds.tv, a video messaging service that lets users record quick videos only 12 seconds in length, has been popular among Twitter users since its launch in summer of 2008. With the service, you can send out a tweet to your Twitter friends once you've posted a video on the site. That's precisely the functionality which appealed to marketers looking for an entry point into Twitter. The only question was how do you get 12seconds users to tweet out videos about the brand?

The solution that 12seconds.tv is introducing today is called the "12omercial." And yes, like it sounds, it's a Twitter commercial made using the 12seconds service. Here's how it's going to work: brands and companies will sponsor 12seconds users to create 12omercials on their behalf. The videos created by the users will be a response to a question asked by the brand. Once recorded, the 12omercials are automatically posted to the Twitter streams of the users involved. Those tweets will include a link back to their video.

The first brand to participate is LG who will begin using the platform to promote their new phone, the Versa. The question they're asking is "what's your Versa vice?" Or, in other words, what's that thing you do with your mobile phone that you know you shouldn't? Is it text-messaging while driving? Checking Facebook while in a meeting? The answers to this question will be varied and perhaps even humorous (or so the company hopes, that is).

Play Along, Win Fabulous Prizes

You may wonder what incentive 12seconds users have for creating these user-generated commercials for these companies. Fortunately, they won't be paid to do this. We say fortunately because once cold, hard cash becomes involved, too many people looking to earn a quick buck would end up creating these "12omericials" and then would clutter up our Twitter streams with their spam. 

However, users will be encouraged to participate - they just won't earn actual money by doing so. Instead, the creation of a video will equate to a sweepstakes entry where they have the chance to win some sort of prize, as determined by the brand. What the prize will be will change with each promotion, but with LG, it's a trip to Las Vegas.

Another reason users may participate is because there's also the possibility of having their video seen by a far larger audience than just their Twitter friends. It's up to the brand how the content will be used, but there are a number of possibilities. Some companies will be selecting the best videos for use on their own web sites, others may use them in online ads, and there's even a chance that videos could find their way to a TV commercial. (In LG's case, there will be a dedicated mini-site set up for the promotion.)

But What If People Say Bad Things?

As we recently saw with the Skittles social media campaign, when people realized they could get their tweets on the Skittles homepage just by using a particular keyword in their posts, they started to abuse the system. Some people posted really (and we mean really) offensive messages to Twitter just to see those messages on Skittles.com...and perhaps to prove to Skittles that their campaign was a terrible idea.

But 12seconds co-founder, Sol Lipman, doesn't think the Skittles campaign was a bad idea at all. He thinks it was an ingenious experiment and perhaps even representative of the future of advertising. According to Lipman, we're moving past the point when brands want to communicate with customers through press releases and banner ads. It's user-generated content that is the future. And what better way to learn about a brand than through a trusted friend's tweet?

Of course, when you put the power of brand advertising in the hands of the people, bad things can happen. That was certainly true in the case of Skittles, but even so, Lipman argues that wasn't necessarily a bad thing. Sure, some people got out of hand, but at the end of the day, people were talking about Skittles. Just because some people did terrible things, it probably didn't mean you started hating the candy or boycotting it. Instead, you just had it a bit closer to the forefront of your mind the next time your sweet tooth kicked in.

Be Brave, Companies - Engage! (It's Your Only Hope)

This radical repositioning about what it means to advertise may actually be a bit too scary for some companies and some will be hesitant to get involved. User-generated content has been known to backfire before. For example, in 2006, Chevy let YouTube users make commercials for the 2007 Tahoe, but what they got were videos about how bad the truck was for the environment. Still, that's not stopping other companies from attempting nearly the same thing. Case in point: Ford. This month, the company will launch their "Fiesta Experiment," a marketing effort that puts promoting the new car into the hands of 100 twenty-somethings who will blog, record video, and post to social media about the their experiences.

In a similar vein, the 12seconds.tv Twitter commercials will offer brands an opportunity to start conversations while abandoning their control over the exact messaging. They may have to take the good with the bad. But in the end, only genuine conversations will convince the jaded, over-saturated customers of today...and especially those known as "Generation Y." As we noted before, that generation especially tends to rely on a network of friends for product recommendations, not traditional advertising.

Check It Out

In addition to being used for branded campaigns, these 12omercials can be created for any promotional purpose. Users can include a URL in the video that links to anything they want - their blog, something they're selling, a charity event, or whatever. A back-end analytics package will help them track the campaign, too.

As far as the sponsored promotions go, each will run for a week. This may change as more brands get on board. LG is up first, followed by Xobni, the social inbox plugin.

While earlier variations of the Conficker worm prevented infected machines from accessing the servers of most antivirus companies, this new variant also blocks access to sites that offer tools for removing the worm like BitDefenders bdtools.net.

Oddly, the Conficker worm now also includes an instruction that tells the worm to remove itself on May 3 (the hackers clearly like deadlines), though after that, it will keep a port open on these machines that will allow the hackers to get back into these computers at any time.

The Big Picture: Spyware, Spambots, Pop-Ups

According to both Trend Micro and Symantec, Conficker, after downloading its update, also downloads a variant of the well-known Waledac malware. Waledac is one of the world's most active spambots.

Security researchers are still trying to understand the connection between Waledac and Conficker's new E variant (only a small number of antivirus products can currently detect this version of Waledac, by the way). Some, however, speculate that this connection could mean that Conficker was created by the same group of hackers that created Waledac and its predecessor, the infamous Storm botnet.

Business Model?

According to Kaspersky Labs' Alex Gostev, Waledac will download a rogue antivirus application onto infected machines, as well as an email-worm that can steal data and send spam. The fake antivirus software will ask users to pay $49.95 for "Spyware Protect 2009," which, of course, is anything but an antispyware product.

Protect Yourself (and others)

Of course, if your Windows machine is up to date and if you have kept your antivirus software up to date then chances are very good that you are well protected against Conficker.

If you want to learn more about Conficker and how to protect yourself, have a look at this list of resources we put together last month. If you want to see if you are infected, head over to this site from the University of Bonn.

Looking just below the surface of this big news, though, there are a number of things going on that make absolutely no sense to us. Facebook's management appears to have lost its grip on reality. The population of Facebook dwarfs that of scores of countries in the physical world; these foundational documents are of immense importance and raise big red flags.

We're excited about the prospect of increased openness and transparency at Facebook. Facebook is immensely important as a sociological phenomenon. We have a lot of questions about the document. Unfortunately today's press call ended after only 5 questions were asked. Imagine a government body presenting its founding documents at a press conference and taking only 5 questions!

Here are the big problems we've seen so far with how things are going down. The contradiction between goals to change the world and promises to obey local laws is the most important.

Facebook is Delusional About its Relationship With Users

Today's announcement came in large part from the controversy earlier this month about the Facebook Terms of Service. The company cut its TOS from 15 pages to 5 pages, it said today, and it made some mistakes when it did so. Users alleged that Facebook's new Terms claimed ownership over their photos, videos and other content posted to the site. Facebook quickly backtracked and said again today that users, not Facebook, own the content on the site. (Though we can't export it elsewhere yet.)

What's delusional about the company's position? Multiple company officials on the call today said that the controversy showed how much of a sense of ownership users have over Facebook and that they wanted a sense of participation in its governing. (You complain about us because you love us!) We'd argue that it is pretty clear people have a sense of ownership instead over their content and want Facebook to keep its hands off. Ownership of content, not the lack of input on policy, was what people were upset about.

Facebook appears to forget that it's just one of many ways people use the internet. It's wildly popular today, but just as people have used other social networks in the past - they have other options for social networks to use in the future. It reminded us of the obnoxious post Zuckerberg put up announcing the Facebook Connect service, instructing users who visited other sites without Facebook Connect to contact those sites and "tell them you want to Connect." We grumbled under our breath at the time that connecting is a fundamental part of the human experience and not a Facebook specific word. The smarminess was nauseating.

Let's keep everyone's place in this situation straight - Facebook is fortunate enough to have won millions of users, but it's for the connection with each other and self expression that they come and stay - not because of any loyalty to Facebook.

Did You Say Data Portability??

Part of the new Facebook Principles document reads as follows:

They should have the freedom to share it with anyone they want and take it with them anywhere they want, including removing it from the Facebook Service. People should have the freedom to decide with whom they will share their information, and to set privacy controls to protect those choices. Those controls, however, are not capable of limiting how those who have received information may use it, particularly outside the Facebook Service.

That flies in the face of years of stonewalling on the part of Facebook around the issue of Data Portability, the ability by users to move their content in and out of Facebook (not delete it from Facebook, export it someplace else). Facebook has made a lot of good points about overlapping privacy concerns, something we've hoped they would come up with innovative solutions for. Now they say we have a fundamental right to move our data around? Surely they don't mean that, not like many users mean it.

As Mark Jaquith said this afternoon on Twitter, "wake me up when FB TOS doesn't forbid exporting your profile. Until then, I don't control my data in any real sense."

Voting May Not Be a Good Idea

Facebook said today that policy changes in the future will be voted on if they stir up enough comments to warrant it. There is no clear public standard for what will be voted on, no details about how the voting will work, etc. Perhaps more important, voting about changes to Facebook may not always be a good idea.

Facebook is a trailblazer, the company is changing the world with technologies like the newsfeed, Facebook Connect, Beacon, etc. Many of those changes were wildly unpopular when they were first made. Product changes will not be put up for a vote, but surely the most dramatic product changes have policy implications. The creation of the Facebook Newsfeed saw huge, vocal protests for weeks. If any part of that change had been put up for a vote it would never have passed. And that would have been a terrible loss because the Newsfeed is very important. Sometimes the technologists at Facebook know what's best; crying Uncle and putting important decisions up for a vote could in some cases be a very bad idea.

You Can't Always Play Nice and Change the World Too

This final issue is the most important one. One of the questions asked during the press phone call today concerned privacy laws. How would Facebook deal with different privacy laws in different locations? The company said they would follow whatever laws were in place where a user lived. On the face of it that might not sound so bad, but in practice a promise to always follow the law is in direct contradiction with the company's goals of changing the world.

The proposed Facebook Principles document begins with these words:

We are building Facebook to make the world more open and transparent, which we believe will create greater understanding and connection. Facebook promotes openness and transparency by giving individuals greater power to share and connect, and certain principles guide Facebook in pursuing these goals. Achieving these principles should be constrained only by limitations of law, technology, and evolving social norms.

Excuse me? How can a commitment to change the world towards openness thus mean anything when openness is against the law in many places around the world? When social norms often favor authoritarian control? As Martin Luther King Jr. famously said "Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted."

Presumably if King had lived at the time of Facebook and his local laws required the company to hand over the Friends Lists of black subversives, Facebook would comply.

We're committed to change towards openness but we'll follow local laws. As The Committee to Protect Bloggers said today, "That's what Google, Yahoo, Cisco & every other company that has helped imprisoned bloggers has said."

Facebook's grand gestures towards voting, participation, transparency and the like are empty words for millions of people who know that when push comes to shove the company has promised it will co-operate with authoritarian governments in controlling the citizens of countries like China, Iran and elsewhere.

Nice Try, Facebook

Mark Zuckerberg is a young man at the helm of a huge company, touching hundreds of millions of lives all over the world, at a time of dramatic social upheaval caused in large part by the kind of technology he is helping create. That's no small job. We hope he can pull it off.

See also: Our Open Thread discussion about today's Facebook news.

Was MemoryUp a "Rogue" Application?

Whether or not MemoryUp actually destroyed personal data and spammed people's contacts, as it was said to have done, is unknown. However, it would have been difficult for it to have accomplished those things. The app required no special privileges to install, so it's hard to imagine how it could have accessed the data and email addresses or how it could have sent out the spam. Also, for what it's worth, the company behind the app adamantly denies the claims. Says Robert Lee, chief technical associate for eMobiStudio, "We are very disturbed by these reports. Whatever damage is out there has not been done by our product."

...Or a Victim of Community Backlash?

The truth about this application may be that it just wasn't very good, not that it was dangerous malware. Many comments about the app in the Android store (prior to the app's removal) and in the forums weren't about losing data but about how the app wasn't worth installing because it provided no real value to the user.

What's even more apparent, though, in reading through the posts and comments about MemoryUp, is that many members of the Android community seemed to have a grudge against the app's creator, Peter Liu, whose drive-by advertising in forum postings got under people's skin. "How many times are you going to advertise this on here?" wrote one user. Later, others bragged and joked about running the "Memory folks out of town." "Peter needs to get a life," said yet another user.

It stands to reason that a handful of Android community members decided to disparage the application to get back at the app's developer...but something like that could never be proven, only suspected.

Yet, if that was the case, those people inadvertently ended up hurting Android in the process. By raising questions about the safety and security of Android platform, they helped to spread "FUD" (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) about this new mobile OS. Even worse, these rumors make the iPhone's closed and "by approval only" model look like the safer, smarter choice when it comes to phones. But as anyone involved in the open movement will tell you, that is not necessarily the case.

Britannica is trying to a take a hybrid approach which combines Britannica's editorial expertise with Wikipedia's principles of transparency and openness.

In the interview with the SMH, Jorge Cauze also bemoaned that Google's search results consistently ranked Wikipedia higher than his own Britannica. The reason for this, however, is simple: you need to be a subscriber to get access to the full content of the Encylopedia Britannica. If you are not, the site will constantly pester you with overlay ads for its premium membership and only give you access to a limited range of features. Given a choice, most writers will link to the free Wikipedia instead of the Britannica, which, in turn, enhances Wikipedia's standing in Google's index.

There are many reasons why Wikipedia trumped Britannica on the Internet. For one, Britannica took a long time to open up to the Internet, which gave Wikipedia a chance to become the de-facto Internet encyclopedia.

Difference in Quality?

As for the actual difference in quality between the two sites, that question still remains to be answered. A 2005 study in Nature concluded that Wikipedia (at that time) was about as a good a source as Britannica, but the study was heavily criticized by Britannica (see Nature's rebuttal of Britannica's rebuttal for more details about the discussion).

Britannica Can't Scale

In the end, however, whenever somebody discovers a mistake in the Wikipedia, those edits can be made public within seconds. Currently, the Wikipedia sees more than 150,000 legitimate edits pre day. The most active Wikipedia users have made over 200,000 edits. There is simply no way for Britannica's editors to approve this many edits - the process simply wouldn't scale unless they hired a lot of highly qualified (and fast) editors.

The first time you use this feature, you have to authenticate with each of the social networks. Once configured, links are published to your Facebook News Feed and to your Twitter stream. (Note: Facebook Connect only works on Firefox at present). An option to email items instead is also provided.

The individual articles found in RSS feeds also have a sharing option which is activated by clicking on a yellow star next to the word "share." This feature lets you save articles with an optional note for later reading . The saved articles are placed in your private activities section.

It is this last feature that has Netvibes' users up in arms. Because the star and link reside on a separate line beneath the article headline and introductory text, it takes up valuable screen real estate which impacts the number of entries which can be displayed on a page. Out of 26 some comments (at time of writing) on the Netvibes blog, a surprising majority of them (25) were against the yellow star for this very reason. Everyone was requesting that this feature be optional, so they could shut it off.

Although 25 people aren't the entire Netvibes user base, they are a good representative of the most enthusiastic of Netvibes users - the ones who take the time to read and respond to the company blog entries. In this case, we think they may have a point. Hopefully Netvibes will take this into consideration and make some tweaks.

However, the user outrage issue shouldn't overshadow the big news of the day: a Facebook Connect sighting in the wild! We just love those. After Netvibes fixes the above issue, the new sharing features are likely to become popular ways to make the entire Netvibes experience more social and fun.

According to a study done by the Sand Hill Group and Neochange, the most critical factor (70% listed it as number 1) for software success and return-on-investment is effective user adoption.

You can have the best software in the world, with the most sophisticated features, analytics and integration, blah blah blah - but if people don't use it, it isn't going to add value. I can't tell you how many RFPs and software selection processes I've been involved with in prior lives that focus almost exclusively on tiny little features that few people will ever use. This study shows that focusing so much on features is missing the boat entirely.

This finding is very interesting for all kinds of applications, particularly enterprise apps but also consumer apps. Features very rarely make someone take to an application or not. Moreover, I doubt most software companies really take user adoption as a holistic approach into account when designing their applications.

If this trend is accurate (and my experience tells me it is), then I think it has very interesting ramifications on how software should be designed, sold and implemented. User adoption is typically something that comes at the end of a cycle. This says it should be one of the most important elements of the entire process. Please share any opinions or war stories that either confirm or refute this conclusion.

The wild garden of services growing from the read/write soil of the new web struggles each time a new app is launched and looks more like a ghost town than a place to enjoy the network effect of the crowd. How can new services ramp up social connections quickly? Recommending "friendship" with active early adopters is one strategy being explored by a number of sites. The end result can be a lopsided environment where a handful of winners dominate the collective mindshare - again.

Friend Feed

The red-hot activity aggregator FriendFeed is one of the latest suspects. FriendFeed lets you view and discuss the activities of your friends across all their various networks (YouTube, Last.fm, Twitter, Del.icio.us, etc.) whether you participate in those other networks or not. Built by two ex-Googlers, the service has stolen our hearts here at RWW and is where we spend a substantial portion of our days. (See Marshall, Sarah, Corvida, Frederic, Alex and the boss, Richard. Don't all friend us at once, though, see the aforementioned big head risk!)

Users are still figuring out how to use FriendFeed, but some of the most popular people there have been discussing how much faster the growth of their FF networks has been than it was on Twitter. We've seen that as well and attributed it primarily to two things: the friend recommendation feature (which is much improved by this script) and the friend-of-a-friend feature (also greatly improved by this script).

Allen Stern of Centernetworks has done some investigative reporting and found that new users are all being served up the same default "popular users" as recommended first friends. Though FriendFeed HQ has said in response to Allen's criticism that they intend to change their algorithm to incorporate more diversity - to date the default user set has changed very minimally.

Here's another of Allen's always charming videos, followed by a screenshot of today's default recommended friends for new FriendFeed users.

Why does this matter? Because we're not on that list. No, we kid. Because funneling audiences towards the same major players that dominate other sites (blogs, Techmeme, Digg, etc.) mitigates a lot of the potential for discovery of new information from diverse sources that could come from a platform like FriendFeed. The tech niche of social media is an elitist place, and occasionally anointing new people like Louis Gray as leaders isn't enough to change that. After playing that role for awhile, Gray (in addition to being a genuinely fantastic blogger) has become an outright mock-deity.

It's also questionable because most of these "most popular" members are making their living commercially through web traffic, and being named a FriendFeed default member has a direct impact on their incomes.

Why, on the other hand, is it not a big deal, too? Those top users also happen to be some of the most interesting and engaging people on the new web - they got to the top in large part because they add a lot of value to peoples' lives. That's not always the only reason they got there, but that's part of it. They were elected leaders, by the market, with all the complications that a statement like that includes.

The default settings are also not a big deal because FriendFeed still offers a lot of ways to discover new people, and because despite the defaults even the most popular FriendFeed users are only followed by a small percentage of the service's users.

Right: The most followed users on FriendFeed, from User21.com's FriendFeed Top 250 Most Followed Users

The Solution

What's the ideal solution to this problem? Attention data. Let me bring my historical interests with me into your application and recommend a variety of people, not just the most popular, who are roughly interested in the same kinds of things I am. FriendFeed, unfortunately, doesn't appear to be incorporating user attention data at all. Who is? Our favorite example is personalized music magazine IdioMag, though it's better in theory than it is in execution.

Seesmic

Once again, plucky power-blogger Allen Stern pounds the pavement to lead the charge on yet another timely story - video conversation platform Seesmic and a hint of default user love.

Seesmic CEO and (by the way) FriendFeed default recommended friend Loic LeMeur uses his company's own technology in a particularly human moment to articulate well the thinking behind the very temporary experiment with default users and the subsequent non-launch of the feature.

LeMeur responds genuinely as a long-time industry leader, and a man on whom venture capital is raining like it was April in Oregon, but Stern appears to begrudge him still for not speaking out about his default status at FriendFeed! It's clearly not in his interest to do so, though. More LeMeur friends anywhere equals more exposure and thus users for Seesmic. As a participant in the social media space - that's his job, to win high profile spots like being a default friend in one of the hottest early adopter networks on the web. He's a pretty interesting guy to watch, too.

Do FriendFeed users lose out in diversity of perspectives? They may.

Digg

Digg is the grandpappy of all the social news sites, though it's never really succeeded in becoming the long-tail social network it's aimed to become. Hitting the front page of Digg is really the one and only goal there. We've written here about the decline in importance of tech stories on Digg but as the mainstreaming of the site continues, the company has also moved into the recommendation space.

We wrote about the Digg recommendation engine before it was publicly available but once it was live the consequences looked remarkably similar to the situations discussed above.

According to a very interesting analysis by JD Rucker, in the days after Digg recommendations went live, this is how the numbers shook out.

"31.4% of the Digg front page was made up of stories submitted by 10 users. To extend it further, 50.4% was submitted by 28 users. Assuming that there are 3000 users who submit in any given day, that's less than 1% who control over 50% of the content."

In this case, it wasn't an explicit set of default users promoted by the company. All of the companies discussed in this post based their recommendations on an "algorithm" but Digg's was presumably the most mysterious and complex of them all.

Did it matter? Apparently to date it hasn't. Recommendation squashed the long tail at Digg, more even than at the FriendFeed.

Digg has made some minimal moves towards supporting APML, a proposed standard for communicating user preference data from one site to another and solving the "who are you?" problem. That's the problem that default users solve, if a website doesn't know who to introduce you to then it's logical to introduce you to the most popular people at the party. In real life, you might appreciate that.

Conclusion

On the new web - things are supposed to be different. Web 2.0 is supposed to blow the broadcast model right out of the water, fostering niche communities where everyone has a valued voice. In many cases that has happened. If you like Monster Trucks, manga or Mediterranean marinades then you don't have to follow Robert Scoble to find those things. But when it comes to tech, the innovative new social applications launching every day are struggling to create a sense of community quickly, because their unique value-added features often depend on it. Pointing at the most popular people around is one way to try to do that. That strategy has its upsides, too.

What's your take on this situation? (Other than wanting a drink after reading such a long post about one particular strategic question faced by startup tech companies?) Do you find yourself living in the long tail on places like FriendFeed, Twitter, Seesmic and Digg - oblivious to the soap operas of A-listers and enthralled by the authenticity of thriving niche communities? If so, tell us where those communities are. We'll all click through, en masse, and enjoy them. Just tell us who to follow once we get there.

Rocker kid photo CC by Ian Ransley on Flickr