On stage at FailCon today, Jay Adelson went over his storied career from Equinix to Digg. Adelson kept emphasizing the fact that he had no regrets despite Digg having failed to pin down acquisition offers from both Current and Google, while the news broke during the panel that Digg had just laid off 37% of its staff.
I asked Adelson while he was onstage whether he wanted to revaluate his “no regrets” comments with this recently reported information, particularly with regards to selling the company early. → Read More
After incredible user backlash a recent poll on whether Digg should bring back the controversial “Bury” button, DIgg CEO Matthew Williams today confirmed that the social news aggregator would be bringing back many of the beloved Digg Version 3 features.
“Recently, we’ve been reinstating a number of the features that many of you loved about Digg. In the past two weeks we’ve brought back the “Upcoming” section, started restoring user profiles from the previous version of Digg, and made small but important tweaks to the site including better pagination…” → Read More
It looks like Digg is trying to resurrect inactive users, according to an email sent to us by a reader. Apparently Digg sent out the email to users in hopes of trying to get those who are inactive back to the site. As the email states, “Come Alive On Digg. A Lot Has Changed Since You Were Last On Digg. Resurrect Yourself.”
It could be a joke alluding to Halloween, which is just around the corner. But even if it is a play on the upcoming holiday, the image is a little morbid considering the recent course of events for Digg. Since Digg launched its new site design in August, the site has been plagued with trouble, including backlash from users, downtime and an executive shuffle. According to ComScore, Digg’s U.S. unique visitors dropped from 14.3 million in January to 8.8 million in August. → Read More
Digg founder Kevin Rose just tweeted out a poll regarding the controversial Digg “Bury” feature, which was taken off the site in the latest Version 4 redesign reportedly due to issues with “Bury Brigades” or people organizing in order to game the site and force certain stories off the homepage.
So far about 1000 people have taken the poll via Twitter (we’re assuming anyone who would take a Kevin Rose-initiated poll about the “Bury” feature is a Digg user). In true Digg fashion, “Cats” is the other popular poll contender, with 21% of the vote. → Read More
There were two surreal moments for me at Disrupt last week. The first was during the SV Angels Party when Hammer was dancing. It wasn’t just because MC-Freaking-Hammer was doing the Hammer dance in a tux and nerd glasses in front of me. It was because the CEO and founder of the media company I work for were on stage looking awkward and white, but dancing none the less. It was because I’ve hung out with Hammer at parties and conferences like the Lobby– two unlikely people sucked in to the Web 2.0 vortex. It was because I ran into the founders of Digg, separately and in different rooms at the party. They were like brothers the first time I met them, and now– no matter what they politely say on stage– they were estranged, with one ousted and the other trying to turn the once-hot company that helped start the Web 2.0 wave around. It was a feeling that something was ending.
The feeling was echoed the next day watching Kevin Rose and Michael Arrington on stage. For my corner of the Web 2.0 world these were two of the most seminal figures. I put Rose on the cover of BusinessWeek at the beginning of the wave, an article that got me a book deal that ensured I’d spend the next year surrounded by people like Max Levchin, Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg and others. And Arrington was the only other reporter I knew back then who wasn’t a total cynic about Web 2.0 companies’ chances. Eventually I’d find we were so like-minded that I wanted to work with Mike– finally leaving my old-media roots behind. One word has summed both of these guys for a while now: Tired. → Read More
This is going to come as a shock to you: But suddenly and for the first time in years, I really care about the future of AOL. And, because I used to host a show on Yahoo Finance, the story floating around about whether or not these two has-beens of the Internet (sorry, new overlords) would be better together has special resonance with me.
I don’t totally agree with Henry Blodget when he says that it’s a no-brainer because they are the exact same company. (Btw, I used to co-host that same Yahoo show with Blodget. How can a business that employs thousands and thousands of people be so small?) Nor do I agree with Mike that working for Yahoo is a fate worse than losing hundreds of millions in acquisition value.
Here are my totally selfish, biased reasons why I hope the deal does happen or doesn’t happen. → Read More
We sat down with Digg co-founder Kevin Rose after TechCrunch Disrupt yesterday to talk about the recent Digg Version 4 launch and the user revolt and media circus that ensued. Rose addressed the lessons he had learned during the tumultuous redesign, including what he would have done differently if given another opportunity.
Rose, who was recently replaced as CEO by Matt Williams, also went in to future product plans for Digg, such as “Interests” pages for different verticals, a product that Rose says will be launching in the next couple of weeks, with the eventual goal being a Digg that allows you to jump into niche interests and form communities around those interests. → Read More
Apparently some of Digg’s employees aren’t super happy that their main source of news about Digg is TechCrunch – probably referring to the news that VP of Engineering John Quinn is out.
Digg Designer Danny Trinh Twitters “I love finding out about @digg company news via @techcrunch. Wonder if they’ll post our lunch menu too..”
Yes, we will. → Read More
Ever since Digg launched its new site design, it’s been plagued with all kinds of trouble, not least of which is that it keeps going down. The problems with the new architecture are so bad that VP of Engineering John Quinn is now gone, we’ve confirmed with sources close to Digg.
In a Diggnation video today, CEO Kevin Rose explained some of the technical issues the site is dealing with and why it can’t simply roll back to the previous architecture. The new version of Digg, v4, is based on a distributed database called Cassandra, which replaced the MySQL database the site ran on before. Cassandra is very advanced—it is supposed to be faster and scale better—but perhaps it is still too experimental. Or maybe it’s just the way Digg implemented it (Twitter uses Cassandra, although not for its main data store, as does Facebook in places, but it obviously is not as battle-tested as it needs to be). Every engineer at Digg is currently just trying to keep the site up and running. → Read More
Digg founder Kevin Rose cheerfully responds to the mountains of criticism around the newly launched Digg 4. His overall theme is that users need to deal with it.
Rose says that he’s “gotta take risk” with the service in his quest to push it beyond the 30 million or so monthly visitors to the masses. He wants 20,000 – 30,000 diggs on the top stories v. the few hundred diggs that most top stories get today.
To do that Digg is pushing stories that it thinks are more relevant to you, because people and entities you follow have pushed those stories, too. It’s a lot like Twitter, most say, and the soul of Digg is gone.
Video is below. → Read More
It’s all hands on deck at Reddit this week.
In the wake of Digg’s bungled redesign, its rival is enjoying a surge in traffic and a jump in ad and subscription sales. Since Monday, the site has been averaging 900,000 uniques per day— a 50% increase from Reddit’s pre-”Digg 4″ average, according to senior programmer, Chris Slowe. The six-member team does not openly celebrate the technical woes of its competitor but there is a certain giddiness in the air at Reddit’s SF headquarters (a small room, tucked in the corner of Wired’s expansive office).
The Conde Nast owned startup is having a moment, and they know it.
On Thursday, we dropped by their offices for a pulse check. While programmer David King’s eyes were glued to his monitor— tweaking a feature that will hopefully improve the site’s scalability— senior programmer Chris Slowe was available to take our questions, video ahead. → Read More
Digg has hired Amazon exec Matt Williams to be their new CEO, we’ve confirmed. This ends a months-long process that began with the ouster of former CEO Jay Adelson in April. Founder Kevin Rose has run the company since then.
Williams has been with Amazon for more than a decade – since 1999. He is currently the GM of Consumer Payments. But he has held a variety of jobs – GM Webstore, Director Tech Alliances, Director Community & Cross-Merchandising and Director, Auctions and Marketplace. → Read More
“Digg v4 is not a redesign, not a reskin, it is a 100% rewrite. It’s completely new design, code, architecture, and infrastructure. It has almost no relationship to the v3 system whatsoever.“
Social news site Digg is currently in the particularly bloody throes of its fifth user revolt, and unlike revolts one through four, we’ve heard that Digg is absolutely positively not capitulating to users on this one.
Has Kevin Rose finally decided to heed our advice? It’s not so cut and dry according to former Digg engineer Ian Eure who wrote “They Can’t Go Back” on his personal blog earlier today. One reason they can’t move backward? Talent, Eure emphasizes. → Read More
The news page on Digg, and particularly the Technology category, is currently plastered with links to discussions and images posted on rival Reddit instead. That’ll bring Reddit some traffic this morning, but more importantly it’s a bit of an embarrassing situation for Digg.
The Next Web speculates that Reddit is ‘gaming’ Digg, but there seems to be something else at play here, namely Digg users actively displaying their discontent with the recently launched new version of the site by using it to promote links to its competitor. → Read More
Today on their blog, URL shortening service Bit.ly unveiled a cute new feature: Clickabit. It’s a Twitter account that surfaces some of the “surprising and bizarre” links being shortened and shared across their network. But the feature also hints at something we’ve been talking about for a while: Bit.ly Now.
“We’re currently hard at work on several systems that will expose some of the interesting data we’re playing with. In the meantime, we’d like to introduce @clickabit,” Bit.ly writes in the post. They key part is obviously the first half. We’ve known for a while that Bit.ly has been planning some sort of service to expose the best links being shared across the web — kind of like Tweetmeme or Digg. But Bit.ly links are shared on email and Facebook too; it would be about more than Twitter. → Read More
If you’ve been on the new Digg at all in the past day or so you’re probably already familiar with the above “Fail Ox” image, especially if you’re trying to use Digg search. The image is new, and is the result of Digg designer Tyson Rosage’s obsession with The Oregon Trail, you know the old school computer game.
Founder Kevin Rose told TechCrunch and Twitter last night that Digg experienced over 1 million unique visits on its launch day (the site has been averaging about 8.7 million unique visits per month, according to Comscore) as well as “a handful of new bugs.” “We hope to have all the major issues fixed in the next 24hrs,” says Rose, which might affect the ubiquity of the “404″ page. Consensus among users I’ve talked to is that the site seems to be moving forward from the scaling issues it had yesterday both in terms of speed and in terms of frequency of “Fail Oxen.” → Read More
The new Digg is here and clearly it is in your best interests to follow us on it. You can do that by going here and I guess following us. You can also follow us on Twitter and you can follow us home and we’ll keep you like a lost puppy. Whatever floats your boat. We’re just trying to keep current. → Read More
Digg Head of Business Development Matt Van Horn is leaving Digg to move over to the “stealthish” startup Path as VP of Business Development. This Friday will be his last day at Digg, which just this week announced its V.4 redesign.
From Van Horn’s announcement email to colleagues:
When I graduated college in 2006, it was a crazy dream to move to the bay area and join a tech start-up. So I took it upon myself to stalk Kevin and crew repeatedly until they created a position for me. It’s now been more than three years since I started here and I have learned so much and am so grateful for the chance that everyone took in bringing me on board. This has been the opportunity of a lifetime and I am excited for what the future has in store for Digg and will continue to support it in any way I can. → Read More
It’s finally here. Digg, the social link sharing site that has watched its once-meteoric rise to popularity level off over the last couple years, is relaunching today as it attempts to surge to greater heights — with an added focus on making the site better for publishers as well as users. Digg v4 will be rolling out over the next few hours, and brings some major changes that could totally change the dynamic of the site. Plenty of invites have been distributed over the last couple months, and we posted an exclusive preview back in May, but for most people this will be the first time they’ve experienced ‘New Digg’ for themselves.
The biggest change to come in Digg v4 is the increased emphasis on social. When you first sign in, you’ll be walked through a flow inviting you to begin following other users, both from a series of lists curated by Digg and from friends on your Facebook, Twitter, and Google accounts (which you can easily connect with). Once you’ve done this, you’ll get to the real meat of Digg. Which, as it happens, looks a lot like the old Digg. → Read More
In case you haven’t heard, there’s a new version of Digg which is on the verge of launching. Beta invites for it are so sought-after that even Bill Cosby had to personally ask founder Kevin Rose for one on Twitter the other day. Thankfully, he got his invite. But for those of you who aren’t stars of one of the most popular sitcoms of all time, we have some good news for you too: we have invites. A whole lot of them.
The first 1,000 TechCrunch readers who click on this link will be able to sign up for the new Digg. And, as an added bonus, when you sign up, you’ll also automatically be following our TechCrunch account so you’ll have a nice full feed of our content to digg. → Read More
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