digg.com

Digg's new iPhone app, which arrives Wednesday, does not bring any of the new, or exciting features announced by the company at the SXSW festival last week. It will, however bring a better and more complete Digg experience to iPhone users than what they've had with the company's mobile Web app.The software, scheduled to appear in the U.S. App Store in the next few hours, was pre-announced by Digg founder Kevin Rose during an FOWA London conference interview back in early October.

Digg has long had a mobile Web browser-friendly version of its site (m.digg.com), … Read more

Digg on Wednesday introduced a small change to its developer API that could have a big effect on the need to visit Digg.com.

The company is now allowing third parties extended write access to the site, which will give users the option to Digg and bury both stories and comments from outside applications. Short of allowing users to submit and comment on stories, these new changes will provide much of the same experience as visiting Digg.com with whatever interface third-party developers have created.

Along those same lines, the company has also launched a reference page for what developers … Read more

Over the weekend, social news site Digg changed how its links work in a way that gives the site an increase in the number of users who visit.

Users of the site's URL-shortening service noticed that if the Web address they had shortened had been submitted to Digg, the shortened URL would then take its visitors to the story's page on Digg instead of the page it linked to. At least it was this way for users who were not logged into Digg; registered users who had turned off the DiggBar (and who had a recent log-in cookie from Digg) would not see the change in behavior.

This may seem like a small change, but it's a big knock on Digg's shortening service, and for Digg's credibility at maintaining features.

Introduced in early April, the DiggBar was originally intended as a service that did three things: one was to shorten links and act as a redirection tool. The second was to bring Digg features along for the ride with a framed bar that would appear on the top of the page and provide a simple way to view user comments, related stories, as well as other Dugg items from that same site. The third was to provide a simpler way for users to publish content, either to Digg itself, or places like Facebook, Twitter, and e-mail. This included giving users the capability to shorten a URL by dropping a Digg.com/ in front of the site's address.

Despite the bevvy of features compared to some competing URL-shortening services, both users and publishers alike found fault in the DiggBar. Users had problems with the service since it drastically hid information about the site they were on, including the URL in their browser's address bar, and any bookmarks they saved, which would retain the DiggBar. For publishers, there was the worry that users would choose to comment back on Digg instead of on their own pages, as well as SEO damage from search engines not properly indexing and attributing traffic since Digg.com was the redirector.

Digg's solution, which came just two weeks after the DiggBar launch, was to make the whole DiggBar experience something users had to opt-in to see. This meant that registered users of the site would only see shortened Digg URLs, and the DiggBar by choice. Stray visitors of Digg wouldn't see either.

In effect this left the DiggBar as something power users could take advantage of, but that casual users would never see--reducing the entire DiggBar feature down to URL shortening.

This clearly wasn't good enough for Digg, since this move nets the site more ad impressions and unique user tracks than it would by acting as a redirection service alone. Back when it was originally introduced, the company was able to get by since the DiggBar displayed ads when people were using certain features such as viewing related content, Digg user comments, and other stories from that site's particular source. But, without the DiggBar on top, and without any kind of recognition--other than in name, Digg was getting none of these benefits.

So is Digg's shortening service now just a way to shorten links to Digg.com pages? Digg founder Kevin Rose went on to say as much in a Sunday night appearance on Leo Laporte's This Week in Tech, citing that the company was having to internally juggle certain shortened-URLs that had become popular from outside sources. Particularly, ones from Twitter where the source site would be on the receiving end of an increasing amount of traffic, but because of the lack of a Digg frame bar on the top of the page, it wasn't easy for users to… Read more

Sub DiggerPlus is a new tool that lets you more easily view sites your friends have submitted to Digg.com. To use it you just drop in your Digg username and it lists all of the stories your friends have submitted in chronological order over the past 24 hours. You can then sort by topic, submitter, and the number of Diggs each story has. The real fun of the service though, is a feature that lets you hop to each site with back and forth buttons, emulating the feeling of navigating an old Web ring.

Compared to Digg's own … Read more

As more government officials choose to publicly answer questions submitted by Internet users, they're encountering a new phenomenon: marijuana activists intent on forcing answers to the would-you-legalize-pot question.

In March, President Obama's first virtual town hall took a detour when questions about legalizing marijuana were voted to the top of the "financial stability," "jobs," "budget," and (of course) "green jobs" polls on WhiteHouse.gov

On Wednesday, it was California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican, who was put on the spot. Digg.com users propelled a legalize-marijuana question to the No. … Read more

In response to a wash of negative user and media feedback, Digg is making a few key changes to the DiggBar, the company's URL shortening and Web page-framing service.

Within the next week Digg is turning off the DiggBar for all of its unregistered users, who will be sent directly to each site's main page without the DiggBar or a shortened link--just like it was before the DiggBar even existed. Additionally, for those who are registered with Digg, there will be an option to turn it back on or off on a permanent basis.

Despite the backlash, Digg'… Read more

Digg.com has just launched a brand new feature called the DiggBar, which as mentioned in a previous post, lets users make use of Digg's voting and community while viewing a source article via a Digg URL. According to a post on the official Digg blog, users will also soon be able to create their own shortened URLs right through Digg and third-party microblogging services like Twhirl.

What's neat about the DiggBar is that it accomplishes most of what traditional software toolbars are able to do. You can see and interact with user comments, view related stories, and … Read more

This week social-news site Digg is launching a new way for users to find new stories by adding a recommendation engine that will suggest things for users to read in the upcoming story section based on past site usage. It will take into account what other people similar to yourself are digging on the site and add a special note that shows how many stories you and that person share in common.

The move is two-fold: One part is to expand the social network that has been Digg since the launch of its expanded profile system back in September. The other is to give upcoming stories a little more attention. Stories submitted to Digg can reach the site's front page a number of ways, either by being linked up to highly trafficked external sites, or simply by natural selection in Digg's upcoming queue. The updated recommendation engine will simply be a new way for those stories to get more eyeballs on them given that the number of submitted stories averages around 16,000 a day, according to founder Kevin Rose.

The new feature is only being rolled out to a random number of registered Digg users and is expected to make its way to everyone else in the months to come. In the meantime, you can get some suggestions for stories you might like based on your previous "digging" habits using a third-party service called DiggSuggest. It doesn't use the same algorithm, or do it passively and onsite like Digg's does, but it comes with some pretty interesting results.

You can see the new feature in action in the explanatory video below. After the break, there's also a video with Digg's chief scientist Anton Kast explaining in detail how the new system works.

… Read more