Digg Digs Into Social Networking
I predicted that 2007 would be an explosive year for social news sites, but it really hasn’t been. With the exception of Reddit getting gobbled up by Conde Nast, not a whole lot has happened to interfere with Digg.com’s absolute dominance of the space. Netscape, an experiment in social news coupled with editorial involvement that I find to be intriguing (though it has its problems), recently announced it is jettisoning its social news presence to Propeller.com, where it may or may not be left high and dry.
I also thought that this would be a big year for social news verticals (a social news/voting site for, say, sports stories or music stories) but that hasn’t yet turned out to be the case. Then there’s the spectacular failure of MySpace News’ launch, a dead horse I’ve already applied many a spectacular beating to.
So, if you’re interested in a large community that can submit news stories and vote the popular ones onto the front page, Digg is really the only game in town. And while there’s certainly still a focus on tech stories, founders Jay Adelson and Kevin Rose claim that non-tech stories now outnumber them, at least in terms of pure volume.
I really like how Digg has handled its product development. From a very simple start, it has layered in new tools and features to meet the needs of its community. For its web-savvy and tech-nutty base, you have things like Digg Spy, Swarm, and Stack.
Digg user profiles have always been relatively basic as well, particularly as compared to MySpace and other purely social networking websites. In an effort to appeal to its increasingly non-tech community, Digg is now planning to roll out more advanced profile features. (As of this writing the new features have as yet to be deployed, but they are said to be “MySpace-like.”)
What I like most about Digg’s strategy is that it’s feature adds don’t complicate or confuse the core experience – if you’re into browsing popular stories, or submitting your own and seeing how many “diggs” that they’re getting (complications and complexities in the voter-weighting model aside!) you can still do that. And for those active users who are interested in exploring Digg’s huge user base, making connections, sharing stories and media, and so on, Digg will now give its biggest fans a way to do that.
Pete Cashmore makes the point that Digg’s move into more pure social networking makes it something of a competitor to his own project, Pownce. Maybe Digg will one day create a Pownce-like offering for its own community?
And Read/Write Web notes that more social networking features means more targeted ads for new ad partner Microsoft. More page views too!
