#“Quick thoughts on the new Digg”
I have never used Digg much. It's perfect for when I have spare time and I want to bounce around different stories. The problem is that first bit, spare time. So like most people, I just used it to pimp the shit out of my own shit. But even that gets boring after a while.
I heard Kevin Rose talk about the new Digg on TWiT recently and I really liked the sound of it. I just got my invite and played around with it for a few minutes. The setup is that you login, optionally follow some well known profiles (like newspapers etc) and then connect to Facebook, Twitter and Google to find others on Digg that you know. Your default view is then the Diggs of all of those people.
Great in principle. I love the idea of taking the link-sharing activity of Twitter and doing something with it. Our tiny version of that from 2007 was to have people write reviews on Twitter and then we'd aggregate them over to LouderVoice.
But there is a big problem, all the stories I am looking at on Digg right now are stale. The Old Spice voicemail tool, which is number two in my feed, was days ago. I think the problem is requiring people to explicitly Digg a story. That can only work if Digging is built into my Twitter client like Tweetdeck. In fact I prefer the Boxee method of showing me every video link shared by those I follow on Twitter and Facebook. Surely sharing a link is implicitly a "Digg"?
A pure Twitter-based Digg would encourage people to use the Favourite feature of Twitter and then count who is doing that on tweets that have links. But for some reason Twitter has never pushed that Favourites thing.
So it appears I'll be using the new Digg as much as the old one.