Profile: Digg

UPDATE: More recent profile of Digg here.

Company: Digg

What is it?

Digg is very early stage, sort of pre-beta. But its getting some buzz. Think of it as slashdot but potentially better. We first came accross it at TheShiftedLibrarian and after checking out the service ourselves we were quite impressed.

In their own words, “Digg is a technology news website that gives editorial control back to the community. Most technology websites allow users to suggest content by submitting links or stories to an editor. If the editor believes the story to be relevant to the masses, he or she moves the story to the homepage. With digg, users also submit links for review. But rather than allowing an editor to decide which links go on the homepage, the users do.”

Stories are first submitted by a user, along with a category. Other registered users will see the story and can “digg” it by clicking on a link. The more it is “digged”, the more popular it is and good things start to happen with the story. Once it has 15 diggs, it’s automatically moved up to the home page. As an example, we submitted our vskype profile from a few days ago. A search of “vskype” on digg shows the story along with others here. Users can choose to digg the story, blog on it, add comments, report it as spam, etc.

Friends (and everyone else) can see what storied you digg by looking at the URL for your username. For instance, the stories that Techcrunch has “digged” are at digg.com/users/techcrunch. Stats for the user are also shown (and we are now determined to make ours outstanding)

“User profiles are one of the most powerful features of digg. Once logged in, digg bookmarks each story for which you have clicked ‘digg this story’. Users and friends can then browse your profile (digg.com/users/username), to see what you’ve been digging throughout the day. Have several friends using digg? Use your favorite RSS reader or Firefox’s live bookmarks to keep track of them all. RSS feeds are available on almost all pages and user profiles throughout the site.”

There is also good, functional search:

Everything is available via RSS, which is a necessary feature of course. Awesome!

The current release is scheduled to be updated on June 26, including a new design and new features. Currently, the site is running slow but they are dealing with the scaling issue. Overall this is a very cool site and we are now behind it 100%. Hopefully the new release will have delicious-like toolbar options for easy post submitting.

We’ll definitely be coming back for a look on June 26 for the new 2.0 Beta!

Screen Shots:

Relevant Links:

Faq
Digg News
TheShiftedLibrarian
Computer internet security
Digg 2.0 Beta
Bite Me

Tags: digg, news, web2.0, techcrunch, blogs, blogging