Digg: From Cult Favorite to Mainstream
When AOL debuted the new Netscape.com last Thursday, one of the first stories to appear on the site's front page read "AOL Copies Digg." To many a fan of the popular social news site, such a headline could not have been truer.
From the capability to vote on stories and the ability to see what your friends are voting on, Netscape had hopped on the new "social news" bandwagon pioneered by Digg. Even the front page itself looked very familiar. But the folks at Digg weren't flattered.
Behind the scenes at Digg headquarters near San Francisco, the 15 employees of the rapidly growing Web startup were putting the finishing touches on the next version of the social news site. The new Digg takes a step forward in transitioning the site from cult favorite to the mainstream Internet public.
However, AOL's Jason Calacanis and his team of former Weblogs, Inc. employees beat Digg to the punch by a full week with Netscape -- offering a site that not only aggregated the day's top technology stories, but topics ranging from entertainment to even video.
That isn't stopping founder Kevin Rose and others, who had some choice words for Calacanis. "He cloned us at the wrong time," Rose told BetaNews in an interview earlier this week. "He should have waited." Jay Adelson, who serves as the company's CEO, echoed Rose's sentiments. "They're doing what we did years ago," he added.
Launching at a Thursday evening event in San Francisco and as a beta on Monday, the new Digg is a clear attempt to break out of the cult status the site has attained in the vein of Slashdot. Now, the company is attempting to attract new visitors through a move outside of tech news, Rose says.
While the site already splits itself into categories, Digg 3.0 will make this a major factor in navigating. The technology category would remain as a top section, however related categories including robots, security, Apple, design, gadgets, and hardware would be merged underneath it.
Science will also remain as a top category, with subcategories that include environment and space; as would gaming, which includes gaming news, and playable Web games. Joining these would be new top-level categories entertainment, including celebrities, movies, music and television; and world and business, which includes business, world, political, and offbeat topics.
Also, the site will allow for the first time the "digging" of videos, which will be placed under their own section. "It's a ground up redesign of Digg," Adelson said.
Registering as a user provides extra benefits. A user would be able to select which topics they are interested in, and only follow those from the front page. The page would also include statistics on what a user's friends were digging, including number of dugg stories, matching diggs, comments, and submission statistics. All in all, it leads to a more customizable experience when visiting Digg, the two explained.
The demand for an expansion beyond technology as well as more control over the experience was near immediate. "Almost two months after we launched, we saw this demand" through what visitors were submitting, Rose admitted. "However, we didn't want to overwhelm the user."
These demands have increased proportionately to the popularity of the site. Adelson said in June of last year, 30,000 visitors per month were accessing the site. Now, that number has skyrocketed to nearly 8.5 million visitors per month.
"It became clear by the fall of last year that we couldn't run Digg on the original structure of the site," he said. Thus, changes were made to both the statistical side of things to continue to keep the ranking mechanism fair and changes were made to the company's backend to make its database more scalable, which also makes the new features introduced Thursday possible.