Does Digg Need an Explanation?
The most common description of Digg is that it’s a social networking news site. But a more apt description is that it’s a service were users submit and vote on content found around the web, thus ranking the “stories” with their diggs. At first, the majority of content that you found there was technology based, but since the site has increased in popularity, there’s all type of topics now, i.e. videos, pictures, political news.
I’ve been using the site for over a year now and I have discovered great content in it. I remember that at first it wasn’t that socialnetwork-y. That has been slowly added as an afterthought. The way to discover stories was more up to each individual user. Of course, there has always been social networking outside of it. But now you can add friends, look at what friends had dugg, “shout” at them, look at who dugg the stories, etc. The Digg company has always given you tools to use the site and find about stories in a myriad of ways. That’s why I’ve been a pretty loyal user and gotten pretty much hooked.
Digg has a Problem
The site’s ever increasing popularity has added a problem. It gets submitted thousands of content on a daily basis. Most users just go to the front page and of lot of maybe good quality content gets ignored. The upcoming section is too overwhelming.
A Tool for the Solution
I was really glad to see the little red beta box in the upcoming section. I know that Digg will be rolling out the feature during this week, but I suspected I will be the last in line. When you go into the upcoming section you’ll instantly get recommendations. You can still look at “All” if you like. You can sort the recommendations by Most Recent, Most Matches and Most Diggs. It has a Diggers like You section where the compatability is shown in percentages. This is all based of course on the stories you have dugged and how many of those, the recommended users have dugged.
Should we Fear the Auto-Bots?
I was really surprised to see suggested topics like music and movies, which are categories I digg a lot. As of now, I got recommended 307 stories out of the 15,277 submitted. For a while, the upcoming section stayed in the Movies category. I don’t know if that’s the way it’s supposed to work, but it went back to all categories as soon as I dugged a different story in another category.
I don’t know if this will kill the problem completely of people ignoring the upcoming section. That’s something that we have to wait and see. But I really like it. It beats the hell out of looking at it in “cloud view” and it’s based on real data. It’s not arbitrary like the “Friends you may know” feature on Facebook based on the friends of your friends, but more like Last.fm’s compatibility feature. It definitely helps.
Check out these links for videos and more info:
