WeFollow is a directory of Twitter users that where anyone can join and associate themselves with 3 tags. WeFollow was a personal project by Digg founder Kevin Rose, but it seems that the information used by the website was useful for Digg. There apparently wasn’t any money involved in the deal. WeFollow has about 654,000 Twitter users connected to tags.

Digg plans to revamp WeFollow by ranking users based on who tags themselves properly. WeFollow will rank users based on the most followers and most influential. Below is a screenshot of the new upcoming design, as uploaded by TechCrunch.

I’m not going to lie, I like the submissions that make it to the homepage of Digg.com. I visit their homepage at least once per day. The news is often times entertaining and relevant in every day news. Many people have built a brand around the stories that they’ve submitted on Digg.

For example, the icon of power Digg user Mr. Baby Man (Andrew Sorcini) built a brand around his Digg icon that features a stick figuring digging with a construction sign. Muhammad Saleem, another power Digg user built a brand around his black spade icon. Many people even decorate their icons depending on what holiday is coming up. If Christmas time is near, people will stick a Santa hat on their icon.

Now when a story is submitted, the user’s icon will not show up anymore. There is still a hyperlink that links to the user’s profile that submitted the story, but I don’t think that is fair for people that have built a brand for their icon. In a way, it makes the Digg community seem less relevant.

Why did Digg do it? Apparently they did it to save costs. Digg engineer John Quinn stated “Today, we’re also making some changes to reduce page payloads and minimize HTTP requests with subtle UI changes. By removing the 16px user icon from stories on the home page and other story lists, we’re reducing HTTP requests to Digg for a warm cache load by around 75%.”

What are your thoughts on the changes? Perhaps you prefer to see the icons? Or do you just not care at all?

Digg’s CEO Jay Adelson said in a company blog post that the the way Digg handles shortened URLs is permanent. Originally, a Digg shortened URL would link directly to the source. Now it links to the source’s Digg story and comments page on Digg.com. However, If you are logged into Digg, the shortened URL will redirect you to the source and not Digg.com.

Adelson said that Digg never wanted to become a URL shortening service. URL shortening services such as bit.ly and tinyurl decrease the size of large URLs so it can be shared over Twitter and other social sites.

The changes apparently took place when Digg founder Kevin Rose was on vacation. At the time, he said he was unaware of the changes.

Digg users are very unhappy about the changes. The DiggBar created a lot of controversy when it was launched. People hated the DiggBar so Digg made it optional for logged in users and discontinued it for logged out users.

Digg did mention that all links created prior to today would redirect to their original story.

Sub.Digger+ is a new script made for social news website Digg.com.  Sub.Digger+ makes using Digg.com a lot more intuitive especially if you and your friends are active on the website.  The service showcases a friends’ story submissions in an iframe slideshow format.  Digg allows you to view a friends’ submission too, but it is delivered in a way where you have to click through many pages to see them.

The problem with Sub.Digger+ is that it is a script.  Digg’s terms of service explicitly states that users that have scripts may be banned.  This is the reason why Brian Cuban was banned and why user MrBabyMan Andrew Sorcini was interrogated last year.  Digg user DiggBoss sent an e-mail to Digg admins about why his scripts should be allowed and why users should not be banned.  Digg employee Jen Burton did not give much of a response to the scripts except that the company was tweaking the algorithm to make Digg users feel like it was not necessary to use scripts.

To get started with Sub.Digger+, go to http://sub.diggerplus.com/ and type in your user name.  After that the Digg toolbar will appear at the top and the Sub.Digger+ toolbar will appear at the bottom.  All of your friends’ latest submissions will appear in ascending order by submission.  There is even a list view feature that shows over 100 submitted friend stories at once.

[via ReadWriteWeb]

Digg has announced a new set of APIs that give developers access to Digg content.  The new API set gives developers access to search endpoints.  The Digg APIs will allow developers to use advanced shortcuts, common search tricks, and search by domain name.

Another API gives developers the chance to find related information on other Digg stories and find similar stories that diggers have dugg.  There is also an API that returns Digg stories with similar keywords.  In the near future, Digg plans to add Digging and burying capabilities to the APIs.

Another major limitation that was removed from the API license is the commercial agreement.  Developers will now be able to use Digg APIs and have full ownership of the fees for free.

[via Digg Blog]

Earlier this week, social bookmarking and voting website Digg.com introduced a new way that they plan on monetizing their website.  There will be sponsored advertisements appearing on the homepage and in the Digg stream starting in a few months.

“The more an ad is Dugg, the less the advertiser will have to pay. Conversely the more an ad is buried, the more the advertiser is charged, pricing it out of the system,” wrote Mike Maser, Digg’s Chief Revenue and Strategy Officer.  “Digg Ads will appear alongside stories in the river. The sponsored content will look and feel similar to regular Digg content, but will be clearly marked as sponsored. It may link to stories, video trailers, independent product reviews – many of the same types of content you see on Digg every day. The goal here is to give advertisers a way to present content related to their brands and get immediate input on whether it’s relevant to the Digg audience, or not.”

The advertisements will be labeled as sponsored and there will be links to trailers, websites, and product reviews.

As much as an interesting idea this is, I strongly believe that it could have its consequences.  The Digg community is extremely sensitive about the type of content that appears on the homepage.  The community seems to have a bit of a liberal bias and prefer to use Apple products over Microsoft.  Let’s say that Microsoft puts an ad into the stream, it is more than likely that more users will bury the ad.  This takes more money away from Microsoft’s pockets.

From what it sounds like, Digg will be doing some rigorous testing to make sure that there aren’t too many flaws with the system.

The above picture is a screenshot of what an ad in the stream may look like.  You will notice that there is a Sims 3 ad in the top right and an article in the stream.

Chas Edwards was the Chief Revenue Officer at Federated Media up until now.  He has quit to become the Chief Revenue and Strategy Officer at social bookmarking website Digg.com.  Digg hired Thomas Shin from Yahoo! recently and he will be reporting directly to Edwards.

Mike Maser, the current Chief Revenue and Strategy Officer at Digg will become the Chief Strategy Officer.  He will control the marketing, community management, and business development at Digg.

Federated Media founder John Battelle plans to start looking for Edwards’ replacement.  This past January, Federated Media cut their staff and decided to start focusing on conversational marketing.  Federated Media and Microsoft also recently started a project together called ExecTweets which I thought was a terrible idea.

Two of Federated Media’s biggest publisher partners GigaOM and TechCrunch recently cancelled their agreements.  GigaOM decided to sign with a different ad partner and TechCrunch decided to sell ads directly themselves.  Digg themselves left in 2007 after a partnership with Microsoft.

Edwards joins Digg at a time where the company has decided to find additional revenue streams.  Digg is also focusing on directly sales and is pushing for profitability.  Digg made about $8.5 million in revenue in 2008 and they will probably need to make double that amount in order to become profitable.

[via TechCrunch]

Above is a screenshot of multiple toolbars being used here that I pulled from an experiment at Rev2.org.  It includes a web toolbar from Krumlr, Ow.ly, Digg, and Facebook.  When I see a screenshot like this, I cannot help but think how this reminds me of GeoCities circa 1990’s when there was that stupid web banner that dragged up and down as you scrolled through content pages.  That banner alone helped contribute to the downfall of GeoCities.

The first one to come up with the toolbar out of all of the Web 2.0 companies was StumbleUpon.  Their web toolbar was just an alternative to the Firefox or Internet Explorer toolbar.  StumbleUpon just made it easier to use the service for those who did not have access to their own computers with the toolbar already installed.

But then Digg decided to replicate StumbleUpon’s web toolbar even though it was not necessary whatsoever.  The community was much better off without the Digg toolbar.  Given Kevin Rose is such an avid Twitter user and Digg wanted more traffic, this is why they created the toolbar and shortened the links for Digg.com URLs.

It didn’t stop at Digg.  Facebook decided to get into the web toolbar game by creating that feature for shared links on the social network.

All of these web toolbars are doing something worse than what the GeoCities banners were doing back in the 90’s.  These web toolbars are absorbing more traffic since it is their domain names being used but loading the content owner’s website in an iFrame.

By not getting the traffic that other websites are taking from you and if for some reason you aren’t getting the link-bank credit, then you could be potentially losing traffic.  Fortunately for Pulse2.com, our main traffic sources are not from these content-stealing web toolbars.  This is why I personally don’t mind it as much as many others.

For those of you out there that are using Wordpress, there are some plugins available that automatically kill off the web toolbars.  One of them is called “Frame Breaker, aka Die Digg-bar die!“

Last week Digg introduced the DiggBar, a web-based toolbar where anyone can see the number of Diggs a story received, the number of comments, etc. There is also a random button that shows stories that have received over 2,000 Diggs.

The DiggBar also has a built-in URL shortening feature so that it makes it easier to share stories on Digg through Twitter, Facebook, etc.

Some of the critics believe that the toolbar makes the original website look ugly. This is because when clicking on an external website through Digg.com, the toolbar appears with a frame of the original website below it. The original website still gets the page views, but Digg gets some extra page views too.

Some clever guy put together a reason why the DiggBar sucks by redirecting a DiggBar.com URL to another DiggBar.com URL four times. Below is a screen shot of what it looks like:

Another DiggBar critic John Gruber and writer of the DaringFireball blog created a custom website for anyone that arrives on his website from Digg.com. It reads “Dear Digg, Go f**k yourself. Your pal, JG.”

Several other critics are comparing the DiggBar to the design of websites from the 1990’s. Frames have no longer become acceptable in web design because of cross-compatibility issues. The DiggBar can be removed altogether by turning it off in the user preferences.

StumbleUpon also recently created a web-based toolbar of their own for those who don’t have access to their StumbleUpon toolbar plugin.

[via Wired]

“Playing with the yet-to-be-released new Digg search. Holy crap…Sammy kicked ass on this one. Filled with awesomeness,” stated Digg CEO Jay Adelson.  Adelson clearly is indicating that a new search engine is on the way.

Currently the Digg search engine filters out Digg story by Title, Description, URL, All Stories, Front Page Stories, Upcoming Stories, Best Match First, Newest First, Oldest First, and Sorts By Most Diggs.  Buried stories can be included or filtered out.

[via Adelson's Twitter]

Once upon a time it was every blogger’s dream to see one of their posts make it to the Digg.com homepage.  That is up until other social media websites started making Digg.com irrelevant such as Reddit, Mixx, StumbleUpon, etc.  I’ve seen the benefits of becoming popular on StumbleUpon a few times and have al seen the benefits of becoming popular on Digg several times.

Personally I prefer becoming popular on StumbleUpon since the traffic slows down after a few days, but it never goes away.  Even after becoming popular on StumbleUpon several months ago, you’ll still get thousands of hits every month from StumbleUpon.  Digg popularity just stays for a couple days and the traffic just goes away.

Late last month, I wrote about how Digg was secretly developing a web toolbar of their own to emulate the success of StumbleUpon and TinyURL.  In an interview with Wired, Digg executives Kevin Rose and Jay Adelson acknowledged the development of the DiggBar. When Wired asked Rose to explain the DiggBar, here is how he responded:

It’s not out yet, but it’s coming soon. Basically, it’s a small, framed bar, it’s not software you install.

It turns Digg into a short URL provider, so now all of our links will be, for example digg.com/8357. When you go to one of these shortened URLs, it draws a really thin bar across the top.

You get the full destination site underneath it, but you also get this thin bar at the top that allows you to Digg it, to see the hot comments on that story, to see related content to the article you’re viewing beneath it. There’s also a “random” button that gives you Stumble Upon-type functionality that takes you to random sites around the web.

If you want to create a Diggbar, just go into your browser’s address bar. Leave the full URL in there for the site you’re currently browsing, and just type “digg.com/” in front of that and hit Enter. We take that entire URL, process it, turn it into a short URL, then bring you back to the page with the Diggbar and the full original site beneath it.

You get redirected to the short URL, so you can grab it and copy it. We also have icons on the Diggbar to post to Facebook and Twitter. It’s just a great way to spread our content to the most popular microblogging services.

I think that this toolbar would actually be a value-add to Digg.com if only they could solve the bias that they have towards certain websites.  In the middle of last month I did a 7-day study on which sites appear the most on Digg.com’s technology section.  It turned out that 8 websites control over 30% of Digg’s technology section.

Soshable.com did a similar study yesterday.  It turns out that they found out that 46% of the Digg front page is controlled by 50 websites.  Below is a list of the top 30 “whitelisted” sites that become popular on Digg on a regular basis.

“In many ways, Digg has become the personal RSS feed for sites like TorrentFreak, xkcd, and Cracked as the vast majority of submissions from these and other sites will hit the front page regardless of the submitter,” stated the Soshable editor that put together the study.

As every day passes I become less interested in Digg and more interested in StumbleUpon.  What are your thoughts?  Leave a comment.

[via Wired]

Looks like Digg does not like users communicating and sharing stories through instant messaging anymore.   It’s pretty clear why.  Many users have been taking advantage of adding people to buddy lists and asking them repeatedly to Digg stories for them.

I’ve heard of cases where users would have hundreds of users’ IM information and send them requests daily.  Personally I’ve used IM information from Digg profiles a few times to discuss social media with users such as Amy Vernon and Muhammad Saleem.  Communicating with other users can result in interesting conversations, but some people can use the same information to try and game the system.

While I think Digg’s removal of the IM information from profiles was a bit harsh, I think it may do some good.  No official word yet on why they chose to remove it yet.

Part 1: Diggnation-style

Part 2: Twitter

If I had to choose between StumbleUpon and Digg about whether I believe one is more valuable, I would definetely choose StumbleUpon.  StumbleUpon suggests different content to every one of their users using an algorithm that is based on interests.  If I like reading about airplanes, StumbleUpon will suggest similar content to me about airplanes.  Digg basically suggests content to me that a bunch of random hardcore users selected.

Digg has taken a lot for being biased in the past.  There are certain users that seem to dominate the homepage over others.  Digg users such as MrBabyMan, msaleem, mklopez, louiebaur, irfanmp, MakiMaki, etc. submit a lot of content and have a good enough of a fan base to get homepaged regularly.  I have no problem with that because it is important for several users to be a benchmark in order to make other users more competitive and keep people interested in the site.

But I strongly believe that Digg has become too biased in terms of the sources of content being homepaged.  The other day I calculated that about 8 websites control over 30% of Digg’s technology section.  Arstechnica, AppleInsider, and Torrentfreak are about 18% of the stories that are homepaged in the technology section.  Now that gets pretty annoying.  If StumbleUpon showed me one of those websites every once every five times I click on the “Stumble” button, I’d get annoyed and uninstall the toolbar.

Let’s also not forget the facts here too.  Is StumbleUpon profitable?  Yes.  Is Digg profitable?  No.  Was StumbleUpon acquired?  Yes.  Was Digg acquired.  No.  Has StumbleUpon’s users revolted in the past?  No.  Has Digg’s users revolted in the past?  Yes, multiple times.  By definition, I’d say StumbleUpon has been more successful than Digg.

What do you do with successful services?  Emulate them.  Digg has admittedly done this with Slashdot and now they’re doing it to StumbleUpon as pointed out by TechCrunch (good catch Schonfeld via Belmont).

Digg is secretly working on a web toolbar.  The toolbar gives the ability to Digg or Bury a page that you are on.  It also shows how many Diggs the story.  The toolbar also reports links to related pages and reports what other pages from the same website have a ton of Digg votes along with upcoming.  There is also a random button that works similar to StumbleUpon.

Another interesting feature that the toolbar has is the ability to create a shortened URL.  It does not use TinyURL or Bit.ly to do so.  It creates six random characters after the Digg.com/ URL.  Then you can share this on Facebook or Twitter.  This feature was pretty much copied from what TinyURL and Bit.ly were already succeeding in doing.

In creating this toolbar, Digg has implied that they want to take on TinyURL and other URL shortening services along with StumbleUpon.  Out of spite, I have decided that I’m never going to use the Digg toolbar or use any of their URL shortening services when this feature comes out.  Instead I will always use TinyURL and StumbleUpon as long as they exist.

By the way, those who think that Digg is not necessarily “jealous” of StumbleUpon’s success because it is not an apples-to-apples comparison, I feel that they should be.  What is your opinion?  Leave it in the comments.

Despite whatever Digg’s administrators tells us, Digg.com has a bias towards certain websites over others.  Why do I say this?  I have a Digg account where I submitted 477 stories and have gotten about 63 websites homepaged so that automatically gives me experience in knowing how the site works.  Below are several cases why I’m telling you that Digg is biased towards certain websites over others.

Case 1 (A lot of Diggs doesn’t meant you’ll get homepaged if the site isn’t “white listed” by Digg): In one case, one of the stories I submitted received over 280 Diggs and over 15 comments, but still wasn’t homepaged.  About 219 days ago, a story called “The Constitution Dies Tomorrow” received over 1,000 Diggs and over 100 comments, but still wasn’t homepaged.  It didn’t get homepaged until TechCrunch pointed it out and Digg probably didn’t want the negative PR from Arrington so they decided to add it to the homepage.

One time I submitted an article from NBA.com and it was homepaged with about 70-75 diggs and one comment.  Even though I submitted that article, I actually thought it made the Digg.com homepage undeservedly based on those numbers.  Those numbers don’t seem very community-focused to me.  I’ve seen a lot better written articles with a lot more Diggs and comments not get homepaged at all.

Case 2 (Crawl3.digg.internal): There have been several cases where people have noticed a mysterious connection on their server called Crawl3.digg.internal appeared shortly before their stories disappeared from Digg.com’s homepage. Pronet Advertising has pointed out that the internal Digg team is notorious for burying stories that they aren’t too fond of. And HMTK.com pointed out that crawl3.digg.internal showed up on his server around 10AM on March 5 when the story disappeared from the homepage.

Case 3 (Pulse2.com experience): Pulse2.com got homepaged once for less than one minute.  One of the articles I put together about 228 days ago explored the benefits of shouting stories and adding friends on Digg.  It was made popular, but never made it to the homepage.  I’ve never heard of a case where this has happened to someone before.  The story was called “How To Effectively Utilize Digg Shouts 101.”  I have reason to believe that crawl3.digg.internal buried it and blacklisted pulse2.com because this site has never been seen on the Digg frontpage since then.  This makes me believe that if you get touched with the crawl3.digg.internal once, you get blacklisted from making the Digg homepage ever again.

I tried writing all sorts of content that would be interesting and not teach people how to use Digg anymore, but it didn’t matter if I had over 250 diggs on a story and 10 comments, it would never be homepaged.  Even this story I wrote yesterday was submitted by Atomicpoet, got 184 diggs, and 15 comments but didn’t get homepaged at all.  If the same story was written by The New York Times, ReadWriteWeb, or Ars Technica, the odds of it getting homepaged would have been much higher.

And last, but not least:

Case 4 (8 Websites Control Over 30% of the Digg.com Technology page):  When you look at the navigation order at the top of Digg, you’ll notice that the Technology section comes first.  This is why I decided to analyze which websites in the Technology section make the homepage the most based on Digg’s bias towards them.  It turns out that the results were pretty staggering.  There are 8 websites that control over 30% of the Technology section homepage.

How did I figure this out?  I obviously had to pick a sample size first.  I decided about 8 days of data is a good enough sample size to base my statement.  So I went back about 8 days worth of pages and counted how many times a certain story from a specific website was homepaged.  I counted about 270 from the technology section were homepaged in the last 8 days.  94 (or 34.18%) of those stories were from the same 8 websites.  For example Ars Technica was homepaged about 17 times, AppleInsider about 16 times, and TorrentFreak about 16 times in the last 8 days for the Technology section.  Those three websites alone make up 18% of the Technology stories that were homepaged in the last 8 days.

Coincidentally around the same time I wrote this article, the Digg blog was writing an article about an update to the algorithm.  Apparently they thought it was hilarious to say that MC Hammer controls what stories get homepaged and which ones get buried.  Its too bad that me and Digg don’t share the same sense of humor. I think I speak for a lot of users when I demand more transparency from Digg.  How many times is a story getting buried?  When a story gets buried, how much does it set a story back?  Which stories are getting buried by the community and which ones are getting buried by internal staff?