digg

Social news site Digg relaunched its Firefox extension on Tuesday, adding a small number of iterative improvements. The company also launched an extension for Google's Chrome browser, which lets users see if a story has been submitted to Digg, as well as vote on it--all without leaving the page.

Both extensions show a count of how many Diggs a story has if it has been submitted, as well as a speedy way to submit links if they haven't. They also let users share any page they're on, not just through Digg, but on social networks like Twitter … Read more

Wow. Numbers crunched by traffic and uptime firm Pingdom indicate that Facebook is absolutely crushing the rest of the social Web in terms of monthly page views. With about 260 billion page views, the sprawling social network's page view count is 11 times bigger than the second-place entry, News Corp.-owned MySpace. It's also 59 times higher than Twitter's, which comes in fourth. (Social network and gaming site Hi5 is third; Friendster, which was recently sold to a Malaysian tech company, is in fifth.)

These numbers are a testament to Facebook's phenomenal growth: remember, as late … 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

NEW YORK--You had two options if you wanted to hang out with Digg founder Kevin Rose at the Web 2.0 Expo conference this week: head over to the lobby bar of the trendy Standard Hotel on Monday night, where Digg was picking up the tab for several dozen of the city's blogger elite; or pack into Manhattan Center Studios on Tuesday night along with about a thousand other young, predominantly male New Yorkers for a live taping of Rose and co-host Alex Albrecht's "Diggnation" video show.

Those are, after all, the two Diggs. There's … Read more

Social news site Digg is experimenting with a new way to give upcoming stories a chance at the limelight with an experiment the company is calling Digg Trends.

Stories that begin to experience a heightened amount of user interest in the form of off-site sharing, user discussion, and of course Diggs, will be presented up at the very top of Digg's home page, as well as being spouted in a special RSS and Twitter news feed. Once at the top of the page, those stories have 10 minutes to get voted onto the front page as a normally dugg … Read more

Web publishers and blog owners have a new toy to play with: Facebook announced Monday that it has launched new "share" buttons with counters, much in the manner of Digg's iconic buttons and the third-party TweetMeme app for Twitter sharing.

Plus, there's more: Publishers installing Facebook share buttons can also get data back related to how many times that link has been shared, how many users have hit the thumbs-up "like" button or commented on shared versions of the story on Facebook, and how many people have clicked back to it through Facebook.

These … Read more

Kevin Rose started a new side project in March called WeFollow aimed at creating a Twitter directory in which any user can add their account to a category. Users are then ranked in the various categories on the site, creating a good way to see who the top Twitterers are in a given subject area. The rumor is now that Digg has acquired WeFollow.

Mashable noticed that the copyright on the bottom of WeFollow now reads "(c) 2009, Digg Inc." This would appear to mean that Digg has in some way come into possession of WeFollow. TechCrunch reports … Read more

Wilson and I both saw that new movie "Paranormal Activity" over the weekend, and although it's being touted as the new Exorcist, we both think it's more like an uncreative, boring version of The Blair Witch Project. Lots of build-up and suspense for a pretty vanilla ending, but I'm not sure what we expected out of a $10K movie. Maybe we've all just been completely spoiled by blockbusters like Roland Emmerch's upcoming disaster movie, 2012. Jeff's not a huge fan, per usual, but watch this insane clip and TRY NOT TO PANIC.

We've seen and played with our fair share of ridiculous iPhone apps before, but the new Puff! app is the latest Japanese game that might raise some flags...amongst other things. Dancing the line between SFW and not, the program allows you to literally blow up the skirts of women, a la Marilyn Monroe. The app uses the iPhone's microphone to sense the virtual gust of wind that "gives the onscreen character a brief moment of embarrassment."

Speaking of inappropriate things, Marge Simpson just scored the cover of Playboy Magazine. In what seems like the worst business plan ever, the November version of the popular men's magazine will feature a 3-page pictorial with "implied nudity..." we're not even sure what that means, but we can't imagine hordes of teenagers flocking to the nearest liquor store to pick up this issue. Besides, we would rather see Lois Griffin on the cover...no offense, Margie.

Video coming soon, check back later today!… Read more

It's been an interesting week for Foursquare, the location-based social networking site.

On Sunday, Foursquare might have been referenced on an episode of "The Simpsons" that was filled with Twitter and Facebook references. On Monday, TechCrunch reported that Digg founder Kevin Rose outed himself as an investor in Foursquare while he was at the Future of Web Apps conference in London. And on Tuesday, Foursquare announced that London will be added to the growing list of cities where its service is available.

Through a tweet, Foursquare announced that it will be bringing the service to London this … Read more