Digg Relaunches With New Design

[engine]

Digg Relaunches With New Design [rethinkdigg.com]

The final version is close to complete, and when you visit Digg.com later this week, you’ll find a beautiful, image-friendly, and ad-free experience.

At launch, v1 will not include a commenting system. When Digg was founded in 2004, it was one of the only places on the web to have a conversation with like-minded people. Today, conversations happen everywhere, and the problem that Digg started to solve in 2004 now has no shortage of solutions. We knew that if we were going to support commenting at launch, we had to do it right, and we knew that we couldn’t do it right in six weeks. In the coming weeks we will conduct a few experiments in commenting that will inform more permanent features.

[Andem]

I almost can't believe that the Digg that we all know is gone.

From what they have posted, the new Digg looks like a typical news aggregator and really lacks the innovation that made Digg popular to begin with. The overall design and feeling of "the new Digg" seem to target a very different userbase than I would have expected; Every image posted reaks of Apple fanaticism.

Overall, the design and colour scheme look like a mix of the new Google design and apple.com and frankly, I'm not a fan of either. A complete turn-around from the original Digg which embraced a diverse set of users with an original design and concept. Even the "Digg" button being a generic thumbs up icon makes the entire project seem dull.

Since they're calling it "v1", which I understand as 1.0, the whole idea of "rethinkdigg" seems rather deceitful since that would imply there are previous versions. It either is or isn't a new sit, a relaunch or not.


This is yet another online version of the New Coke. Though to be fair to Coca-Cola, the formula of their new brand was unique.

p.s.: Any real professional 'team' of 'developers' would have not released a product concocted, designed, developed and launched (with an original userbase of millions) in a matter of 6 weeks with a version number of 1 with no development phase designation. "The New Digg" should certainly have a pre-alpha designation.

[linkbuildr]

Pinterdigg?

[mcneely]

Something about the new Digg.com site look reminds me of one of those magazine styled blog downloads from Wordpress ..

[ByronM]

Looks like they hired the verge's webmaster..

[engine]

Can it ever recover, that's the questions.

Only time will tell.

[seogenx]

Competition in social networks is high right now and to be stable or continue, there are more expectation of Digg users from its new design. The concept is really cool but the interface and somewhat the content should be strictly a categorized.

[wolfadeus]

I have no idea how this will work out and I wish the new owners all the best... but I miss the old digg. :(

[Marketing Guy]

Design aside, it actually works reasonably well and integrating with FB and allowing you to save stories to an app is a good move.

Aggregated content is notoriously difficult to monetise. Data on webpages that have been saved for later reading however is a valuable asset to have. Doesn't have the spam element of Diggs / likes / whatever and could be a pretty good relfection of a site's popularity. If former traffic levels can be established, Betaworks will have something pretty solid to potentially sell on to one of the search giants.