Switzerland sides with Microsoft...Facebook's $240 M payday...Digg shouts up

How fast can the news move and still be reputable?

Afternoon of May 26, 2009 > Digg's move to drop shouts (see item above), which was announced at a town hall on the site earlier in the month, brings to a close an unfortunate passage in the site's social-networking story. It also signals that the social-networking sphere, like the Web before it, is leaving its Wild West phase behind.

Shouts must have seemed like a good idea at the time, allowing users to alert their friends when they had a hot story posted to the site. It goes without saying that spammers took the idea and turned it into something filthy and unnatural -- in this case, a tool for both putting their stories on blast to zillions of "friends" and gumming up the Digg system with junky stories, with little or no penalty for doing so. Various users made recommendations for putting things right, but in the end the patient could not be saved.

Digg's decision to let Twitter, Facebook, and e-mail relationships do the heavy lifting on shout-type recommendations is an important moment in the growth of the social-networking ecosystem. By requiring that would-be shouters use their Twitter or Facebook or personal e-mail accounts to do their thing, Digg promotes a soft of confederacy of social-networking reputation, one that requires the shouter to stake not just his Digg reputation but his bona fides on another service.

Reputation and social networking have always been closely related of course -- from the days of Usenet through Slashdot's moderation systems to StumbleUpon, Delicious and their ilk. And the idea of federated identity is a major concern for those among us to think about things like Facebook Connect and OAUTH for a living.

But Digg's change advances the conversation by advancing the idea of selecting and promoting news stories in real-time, or something like it. Kevin Rose has said that speeding up to Twitter time -- "living and breathing," as he says -- is a priority for his site. Making news items shift in prominence and popularity in real time is powerful stuff; it would potentially make Digg as powerful as any news aggregator (you hear that, Google News?), and would -- if Twitter's sheer numbers started coming to bear regularly on Digg vote tallies -- have the potential to drastically change what we mean by the daily news cycle. (Which, let me tell you, isn't a nice thought on Day One of a feature devoted to sussing the daily news cycle. Damn you, Rose!)

The implications of real-time, reputation-dependent news feeds touch just about every field of human endeavor that touches the net. Douglas McIntyre at 24/7 Wall Street touched on a few salient points yesterday in a fine post, noting that the combination gives certain industries (marketing, stock trading) quite enough rope to hang themselves. (He also touches on some public-service applications for which I think the fail Whale-prone Twitter isn't now and may never be suited, but isn't that the post of blogging?)

Or maybe you don't have to go far off the beaten track at all to see where this trend's headed. The New York Times, an excellent index of the trailing edge in technology, just introduced its very first "social media editor." Jennifer Preston, who formerly edited the regional editions of the paper, announced herself to the world by Twittering, but other reports indicate that she'll also be doing a certain amount of reining in the troops.

It's hard to imagine a news organization with a more parochial approach than the Times has to doing things, just as it's hard to imagine a media company working harder to stay on the bleeding edge than Digg. Somewhere between the two, you might catch a glimpse of the future of reputation and reliability online.