The New Digg Just May Work
After several hours of browsing the interface of the new Digg, I have come to the conclusion that Kevin and co. may actually be on to something. I had my doubts initially though. With the addition of the expanded profiles, they seemed to have a Facebook/Myspace feel, and I feared the whole “Hey, I’m sexy, digg my stories” fad that was bound to happen.
One controversial new feature is the new system of viewing and interacting with your friends and their submissions.
You now have to click through the story to digg it, which most would agree is what you should do anyway. The only fault of this system is that active users have over 150-200 active friends.
There is no way to tell which stories you already dugg, thus a lot of double checking will be needed if you want to be supportive of the great news that your friends submit.
Imagine the pain of a faithful friend with over 250ish active friends!
My favorite addition is the shout. I had doubts about this system, at first, but a friend that had been submitting stories that I found interesting for months, wrote a shout to me and thanked me for being his friend. I had no idea that he was a new user, and within hours of the new update, I learned more about him than I had previously known in the past month. You can even check shouts that your friends are sending as well. If you all are active at the same time, you can even carry on a 3/4-way conversation with each other, with other friends that notice it being able to join.
With shout, you can also share stories with friends that you would like for them to check out. The current theory is that top digg users can now easily send out their stories to friends, thus faster promotion of their stories. I doubt that this will be the case, and if it turns out to be a problem, it is easily tracked by admins.
It will be interesting to see how digg users utilize all of the new features in the coming months. You can even do “twitter” type status updates, and real-time chatting seems to work pretty well.
If the idea was for friends to be able to interact better, then digg admins have done a good job. This new method also encourages users to interact more in the upcoming sections, as now that is where all of the action is!
The updates were long overdue, as Digg seemed a little “quiet” at times. Now all we need is that picture section!
Posted in Social Networking
You have reached the personal blog of Howard O'Berry. I enjoy blogging about tech and current events, but being that this blog is personal, pretty much anything goes. You can catch me on 
Tamish September 20th, 2007 at 4:07 pm
i should say its awesome .