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 can now create called "DiggLite." This is a stripped-down version of Digg.com's home page that includes all features developers can implement in their own tools. But it's missing many of the bells and whistles found on Digg proper. The company is also planning to update its Firefox toolbar add-on to let users Digg any page they are on without having to visit Digg itself.
DiggLite is a less featured version of Digg that makes use of Digg's new writeable API calls. It also features no advertising.
(Credit: CNET)Prior to Wednesday's tweak, Digg had updated its API back in mid-June, giving developers access to its overhauled search engine, as well as tweaking its usage terms to allow for commercial applications. It also allowed third-party apps to view some user data, including stories any particular user had favorited, which paved the way for third-party recommendation tools.
The move to give developers more of Digg.com's features is an exciting one for developers, but a bit odd given Digg's current business model of pushing advertising on its users. In recent years, the site has filled in with more ads, including a recently-released (and notably experimental) advertising model that has users control how long certain ads get to stay on the site by voting on them as if they were regular news stories. There was even a campaign from McDonalds a few weeks ago that placed certain upcoming stories within the context of being as fresh as a breakfast sandwich.
So it does seem a little odd the company would be willing to risk losing a few users to third-party Digg front-ends that offer up a (now richer) Digg experience. This could become even more muddled when the company extends its API to allow users to submit new stories and comments--something it hinted at in Wednesday's blog post. Then again, between this and the launch of its real-time Trends experiment, it could just be a sign that Digg's real-time home page overhaul is ready to roll.
On Tuesday Digg announced big changes to its API that should make third-party developers happy--and maybe even rich.
The most major one being that the company has let up on its use for commercial applications, meaning that developers will be able to create services that take advantage of Digg's content and community without first having to ask for permission from the company. This includes pulling in content from the service and either charging to do so, or including on-page advertisements--two things which kept application developers from making a profit, or even charging for their creations.
The old and new grant of license for the Digg API. (Click to enlarge.)
The updated application programming interface also includes:
- • Access to the site's search engine which was overhauled back in early April. This lets developers add search to their own apps, and use all of the specific modifiers and domain filters that are found on Digg proper.
• Access to stories people have marked as favorites, as well as the related stories and keywords on any item they may be viewing. This is something that Digg rolled out late last year on its story pages and has kept more users clicking on other stories within Digg
Digg VP of engineering John Quinn says that following this release, the Digg API will finally be updated to allow third-party applications to "participate" on items on the site. This includes digging and burying stories, along with commenting, "favoriting," and marking stories as inaccurate or lame. Until then, even with these updates, all third-party applications are simply viewing activity from users who are accessing the site from Digg or Digg mobile.
Digg launched an API recently, a way for developers to write new ways to submit stories to Digg and to extract data from the service. One intriguing new app that uses the API is the Smart Digg Button for Firefox. There have been toolbar icons that make it easier to Digg stories before, but what this add-on does is a little different. It tells you, in the lower-right corner of your browser, how many Diggs the page you're visiting already has. If you click on the notification, you can add your own Digg, too.
Simple and a little scary: Digg stats for every page you visit.
(Credit: CNET Networks)It's a cool idea because it shows you how popular every page you visit is among the Digg audience. But it's a little troubling, as well. As Digg users have noticed, in order to get its data, the add-on is sending the URL of every page you visit to Digg. I'll say that again: If you use this add-on, Digg is collecting your browsing history from this step forward. Whether or Digg actually saves the data or analyzes it is unknown, but this tool--which Digg didn't even build itself--does give the company a scary capacity to collect deep information about its users. It reminds us, of course, of Google, and the recently-released Web History feature that reveals to you what Google already knows: Every page you've visited after you installed the Google toolbar. In other words, the Smart Digg Button tool badly needs an "off" button.
Still, I am always curious to know what the Digg community thinks of a particular page, so I'd like it developed further. I like ActiveWeave's BlogRovr (review) feature that pops up related commentary from around the Web on pages I visit. I think it'd be pretty cool if either the Smart Digg Button or BlogRovr would pop up commentary on pages from the Digg user base.
As with Digg in general, the Smart Digg Button add-on needs some work done on disambiguation. You might be viewing a page that's already on Digg, but the tool won't show an accurate Digg count because the URL you're using isn't the same one that's been Dugg. If you clicked on a link from a tracked Web site (like CNET) or from an e-mail, RSS feed, or a site's syndication partner, this is likely to be an issue.
If you don't identify with the Digg mob, skip this tool. But if you want to see a quiet but running indication in your browser of what Digg thinks of the pages you visit, it's a worthwhile download.
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