Digg today responded to early user feedback about its plans for a Google Reader replacement announced earlier this month, saying that it has narrowed down incoming requests to four key points: keep it simple, make it fast, synchronize across devices, and, finally, allow for easy import from Google Reader, of course. However, the company also hinted at its plans to go beyond just a Reader clone… → Read More
Google Reader being shut down by its malevolent overlords leaves a gaping, Google Reader-sized hole in the market where it used to be. Many are stepping up today to announce that their products or services can act as a replacement, but one source is specifically saying it will build a functionally complete replacement – news aggregation service Digg. → Read More
Digg today took to its blog to share a bit of information about its user growth and monetization plans, now that it’s been at Betaworks for nearly six months. The company said that Digg’s user base has doubled since the Betaworks takeover in August, and it also confirmed that Digg’s “Apps We Like” section is one of the site’s first efforts to monetize the new property. → Read More
We have a story on our site today about that guy who accomplished a very long space jump. Baumgartner, or something. Apparently this story has made the front page of Digg, and now that front page of Digg is coming in third in referral traffic to that story, on a Sunday, bringing in around 40 unique readers to Facebook’s 100 or so at any given moment according to Chartbeat. → Read More
For anyone that has followed Silicon Valley for the past ten years, Jay Adelson is a name that you know quite well. He’s best known for his work with Digg, during its heyday. After moving into the CEO position at SimpleGeo, which has since been acquired by Urban Airship, we’re told that Adelson is ready to make another run at a startup.
A tipster says that Adelson posted in a private Facebook… → Read More
After Digg’s long fall, Betaworks acquired the site in July and put its News.me team in charge. Six weeks later, the new operators launched a complete overhaul of Digg. However, while interest in Digg had remained (a surprising amount, according to new CEO John Borthwick), the new site removed user access to old data, i.e. everything Digg users had ever posted to the old iterations of the site… → Read More
For three straight days in early August, unintentionally gay porn innuendos of Olympic men’s swimming rained king of traffic on Buzzfeed, the breakout curated newsite of viral content.
Buzzfeeds closest competitors, Reddit and the newly relaunched Digg, each featured dramatically different stories, from the Syrian rebellion to video game history (and, of course, plenty of cats). For 4 days… → Read More
Last night, I wrote about Kevin Rose not responding to questions on his AMA on Reddit. Rose was at a birthday party last night but has returned to Reddit today and has posted YouTube responses to five Redditers’ questions.
After all the coverage on Digg’s sale and Rose personally a few weeks ago and now on the launch of new Digg, it’s very interesting to hear Rose’s thoughts. He does a good job… → Read More
After just six weeks of hard work, Digg‘s new owners at Betaworks just flipped the switch and re-launched the site. The new Digg was originally scheduled to launch tomorrow, but despite the tight deadline, the Digg team managed to get this completely rewritten version of the site out ahead of schedule. As promised, the new version of Digg puts a strong emphasis on images and is currently free of… → Read More
After its new owners decided to go back to the drawing board and figure out what to do with the former Web 2.0 darling, Digg is relaunching on Wednesday. Today, a week after its new owner Betaworks explained why it bought the site and announced the August 1 relaunch, the company has published the first mockups and screenshots of the new Digg v1 and explained what the user experience on the site… → Read More
After Betaworks acquired Digg earlier this month, there was a lot of speculation about what the company planned to do with the service. Today, Betaworks’ New York-based News.me team, which is now in charge of Digg, posted its first update. The plan, according to this update, is to launch a new Digg v1 on top of a new infrastructure and fresh code base by August 1. With this launch, the team says… → Read More
Digg, which in its heyday was effectively run by its power users, is dying. Wikitravel is probably joining it: two-thirds of its admins want to jump ship to the greener grass of the Wikimedia Foundation. Who in turn have their own people problems–a stubborn gender gap and a diminishing number of active admins. Meanwhile, across the Web, people are asking “Is StackOverflow being ruined by its… → Read More
Sun Valley aside, the story of the day today is that social news site Digg has sold its remaining assets for $500K to the NYC-based tech firm Betaworks; While that number is indeed in the ballpark, we’re hearing from multiple sources that the total price of the Digg acquisition was around $16 million, including the price paid for IP by a previously unreported acquirer, LinkedIn. → Read More
Betaworks, the company behind bit.ly, news.me, Chartbeat and a number of other successful products, has acquired the social news site Digg.com for an undisclosed amount (rumor has it that the price was just $500k). Betaworks’ founder John Borthwick will become the new CEO of Digg. The site’s current CEO Matt Williams will join Andreessen Horowitz as Entrepreneur in Residence after the Betaworks… → Read More
Another bit of closure for Digg as the company continues to look for a buyer of its technology and its site: its engineering team is joining SocialCode, the social media advertising and analytics subsidiary of the Washington Post Company.
We first wrote about the engineers getting hired by WaPo on Monday, when rumors began to swirl that the newspaper group had bought Digg. Now the news has been… → Read More
With 17 million monthly uniques at its disposal, news aggregator Digg, which is attempting to overcome the user exodus caused by its unpopular Version 4 redesign in late August 2010, needs to find a way to keep its usership engaged, and to grow.
It’s solution? The Topic Newsrooms beta, which separates news into top categories like Technology, Entertainment, World News and even topics as… → Read More
Digg has raised a new round of financing, we’ve confirmed. It’s an inside round, meaning one or more existing investors put in the money.
We’ve heard the amount raised was single digit millions, probably around $5 million. CEO Matt Williams has confirmed the financing to us, but won’t give an exact number on the amount raised. → Read More
The Financial Times yesterday reported on the upcoming IPO of Chinese social network Renren.com:
The strong interest [in Renren's IPO] stems from the fact that there is no major social media or social networking company open to public investment. With a Facebook IPO at least a year off, many investors are keen for a slice of “the Facebook of China”.
The offering is set to price on Tuesday… → Read More
Well by Silicon Valley standards, that certainly wasn’t a long “stealth” period. Just weeks after he quit Digg, Kevin Rose is announcing details of his new startup. Knowing Rose, I can tell why he’s so excited to get started. He’s constructed a company that plays perfectly to his strengths in the early days– but will test his weaknesses long term.
It’s called Milk, and it’s going to be a… → Read More
I spoke with Digg CEO Matt Williams today about the departure of founder Kevin Rose to work on a new startup, and where Digg goes from here.
Williams is extremely bullish on Digg. Traffic stabilized in January, he says, at about 20 million unique monthly visitors. The company has just 35 employees, he says, after 40% layoffs late last year. With the decreased burn rate the company is approaching… → Read More
Startups in Silicon Valley are like old generals. They don’t die anymore, buoyed on life-rafts of lingering venture capital and modest revenues. They just fade away, eventually purchased for assets that are a shadow of their former promise. It’s pretty clear that Digg is on that path.
The company isn’t dead, but it’s been fading away for a while, and its soul is all but gone. The company can spin… → Read More
Wow, when I wrote last night that Kevin Rose doesn’t really use Digg anymore, I had no idea how perfect the timing was. It turns out Rose really has tuned out. Because, say multiple sources, he’s already resigned from the company and is closing a $1+ million financing round for a new startup he’s founded.
Rose first launched Digg in December 2004. The service was an instant hit, and for a long… → Read More
How bad are things at the once-mighty Digg these days? Not so good. It’s been months since Digg relaunched in August in a quest for relevance. They had 18 million unique worldwide visitors that month according to Comscore. That dropped to just under 12 million in January, a 33% drop in just five months.
Everything official coming out of Digg says things are great and that a the company will find… → Read More
As we wrote in late November, Digg’s longtime VP of Engineering John Quinn joined flash sales giant Gilt Groupe. Today, Digg is announcing his replacement—Ben Folk-Williams.
Folk-Williams was previously VP of Engineering at search and listings company Vast.com, and prior to that, led engineering at analytics startup Coremetrics, which was acquired by IBM last June. → Read More
Floodgate’s Mike Maples came in the studio yesterday to pre-tape an episode of Ask a VC, and while we had him here we picked his brain about the state of the venture industry. We started by talking about why his firm, Floodgate, is out of step with the broader Super Angel movement. Not only does Maples not believe you can make money through a spray-and-pray-and-flip approach, he doesn’t want to… → Read More
What’s the Next Big Thing after social networking?
This has been a favorite topic of much speculation among tech enthusiasts for many years. I think we are already witnessing a paradigm shift – a move away from simple social sharing towards personalized, relevant content.
The key element of the next big thing is the increasing significance of the Interest Graph to complement the Social… → Read More
In a step back towards the old Digg, Digg Product manager Mike Cieri just sent out an email to partner publishers stating the intent to remove the RSS submitted stories feature. For those of you that remember, the RSS submission feature was how stories from the Reddit publisher account on Digg were sent to the Digg front page in an act of rebellion against the V4 redesign of the site last… → Read More
Editor’s note: Henry “Hank” Nothhaft, Jr. is the co-founder and CMO of Trapit, a virtual personal assistant for Web content still in private beta that was incubated out of SRI and the CALO project (as was Siri, the conversational search engine bought by Apple).
One of the most interesting concepts to emerge in media and tech lately is that of “serendipity”—showing people what they want… → Read More
Jay Adelson, the CEO of Digg until April 2010, just landed in a new position. He’s taking over as CEO of location services startup SimpleGeo, and will join the company’s board of directors. Founding CEO Matt Galligan will become the company’s Chief Strategy Officer.
SimpleGeo, which has raised nearly $10 million in venture capital, allows companies to add location features to applications. → Read More
In a pivot away from the “voice of the crowd” philosophy central to Digg’s early culture, the social news site has launched a human curated feature called “Breaking News” which spotlights top stories selected by Digg staff. As of today you can find Breaking News in red widgets labeled Breaking News to the right of the Upcoming, My News, and Top News sections on the new Digg. Breaking News… → Read More
Austin, TX
Seattle, WA
San Diego, CA
Menlo Park, CA
Boston, MA
Disrupt Europe: Berlin Hackathon
Berlin, Germany
