Announced Monday and now live for all registered users, Digg's new recommendation engine adds a new layer of social context to the upcoming section that lists stories dugg by other users and how much their reading habits match up with yours.
Like I said earlier this week, it's a two-fold effort: one to give the social-networking element of the site some love by giving users more exposure to like-minded people, and another to make sure the site's massive influx of submitted stories gets a little more attention.
The problem is, the new system does little to solve that second problem, and in fact has taken the site a step backward from its previous version.
This no longer exists.
I speak of course of the removal of a very necessary feature called the cloud view. This would take the list of stories from just 15 a page to hundreds of headlines in a huge swarm. Better yet, those stories would be sorted in chunks (by the hour), and were set up to let you quickly eyeball stories that had begun to gain traction by headline size and color.
The cloud view has up and disappeared on us. Attempting to go to an old link with it enabled will give you an error page, and there's not a way in the user preferences to toggle it on and off. This means to go through a few hundred stories in the upcoming section, you'll need to page through at said 15 pages at a time. This wouldn't be such a big issue at a few hundred a day, but as founder Kevin Rose said Monday, we're dealing with an excess of 16,000 submissions--a number that's only getting bigger.
The fix:
The first thing that needs to be done is to bring cloud view back, but I'm almost forgetting in my nostalgia that it was a flawed system to begin with.
Cloud was great, but it was not easy on the eyes. Headlines were small, and the only way to get around that was to increase the text size in your browser.
Digg's Swarm offers an interesting prospect--tiny headlines that can expand to unveil nearly the entire entry.
(Credit: CNET Networks)What could make it even better is something that already exists as part of Digg labs, Digg's playground for visualizations put together by the folks at Stamen Design. One in particular, Swarm is one of the most popular and jaw-dropping cool ones on there. It tracks stories in little flying blobs. Clicking on any of these will expand it with the title, description, and current digg count. From there you can dig deeper (no pun intended) and see the actual Digg submission page with user comments and all sorts of sharing options. Thus the exploration process is complete.
Applying a similar model of swarm to cloud view is a very feasible way to make the section far more useful. People could see headlines and simply click on them to know more without having to visit another page on the site and get lost from the upcoming section entirely. Likewise, the new recommendation engine could highlight items worth looking at, without relegating them away from other submissions that might catch the user's eyeballs.
I'm afraid in the current state the upcoming section is certainly more targeted, but it's pulling users away from some of the discovery that makes Digg so fun and engaging, which is what keeps users like me coming back. Without that, it's just another popular link site.
Update: I've heard back from Digg about this, and it looks like the cloud view is not coming back. Here is the response I got:
"The cloud view was originally designed to help the Digg community parse through larger volumes of stories. As the sheer the volume of content in the Upcoming grew, now over 15,000 submissions a day, the stream became too active for cloud view to be a good user experience (which had a small number of users). We think the Recommendation Engine is the best way to filter through, and present, the most relevant content in the Upcoming section."
Makes sense, but I still think it could stick if the UI was improved. The recommendation engine will be giving some stories attention, but many smaller ones will still slip through the cracks.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: I'm a sucker for pretty-looking things. It helps when they're actually useful, too. In the case of most items in Digg's labs section, the latter can't often be said, but they're certainly fun to look at. Today Digg launched a new visualization called "pics," which is a new way to see what pictures people are digging in real time. The new feature coincides with the enhancement of a pictures section, and recategorization, which took place earlier this month.
Each category on Digg gets its own section, and photos from each story show up every time they're dugg. You can see right away which stories are hot, just like you could with any other Digg visualization, but in the case of pics, you can actually look at the picture without even having to open up the story. The page also has keyboard shortcuts set up to let you traverse the landscape of stories with your arrow keys.
Like all other Digg labs projects, the visualization was made by the Web 2.0 heartthrob studio Stamen Design, which built out Trulia's real estate visualizations, Twitter Explore, and the (now-defunct) Oakland crime maps.
Digg's got a new visualization tool for its image section.
(Credit: CNET Networks)
When Digg first came out with its labs section, almost immediately people threw together unofficial screensavers for each of the visualizations. Since the visualizations run in Adobe Flash, the user creations often just loaded up the pages in a full-screen Flash viewer. Today, Digg has launched official versions of the screensavers for all four of their labs visualizations, which were originally put together by Stamen Design.
Just like the Web versions, you can sit back and watch the current activity on Digg as it's happening, and interact with any of the content. The screensavers are cross platform, and run on Windows XP, Vista, and Mac OS X 10.4. You'll also need the latest version of Adobe Flash. There's still no Linux version (an outspoken quotient of Digg.com users), or support for users with dual monitors, meaning the <1 percent of Digg users are left in the cold.
Twitter's just launched a new portion of their service called Explore. It's essentially a "labs" section, and home to a handful of old (and new) tools to integrate and browse Twitter. The newest addition, called "Blocks," is a 3-D visualization of your friends and followers, and what amounts to a 3-D social graph of Twitter buddies. The tool loads up with a neat popping effect that looks like little rooftops, and similar to the neat startup video on the Apple TV. Each one is actually a message. Mousing over it will show you who wrote it, along with who wrote any surrounding messages. Clicking on it zooms you down to see what it says. One you're there, you can quickly navigate from message to message using your keyboard's arrow keys.
The visualizations were done by Stamen Design, the same group that created some neat flash tools to track activity on Digg, and Trulia's Hindsight--which launched earlier this year.
Check out your Twitter contacts, and their contacts all on the same page.
(Credit: CNET Networks)
Browse from message to message by using the arrow keys on your keyboard.
(Credit: CNET Networks)
Metagator Popurls has a fun new feature this morning called Popurls.TV that shows you a real-time traffic map of links people are clicking on, and also where they're clicking from. Clicking any single link will take you right to the original story. It's across between Digg Spy and Twittervision, and like the former, it's a fun way to see what's popular on the site. For a more exact account of what's doing well, there are also three sets of links above the map to show you the most trafficked stories within the last hour, day, and 78 hours.
If you feel so inclined, there's a full screen mode for the map, although I wouldn't recommend it unless you've got a speedy connection, as links tend to jump so fast, there's not a lot of time for it to catch up.
This isn't nearly as cool as some of the visualizations coming out of Digg's labs, but I think it's almost necessary at this point for content aggregation sites to provide several ways to ingest content besides a front page. The next logical step is for Popurls to let people browse geo map clicks by time, to see which stories are the most popular in which region at various points during the day.
[via Center Networks]
Popurls.TV shows you what people are clicking on in real time, along with where they're from.
(Credit: CNET Networks)
Digg seems to have outgrown Google as its ad provider, as today marks the start of a new three-year deal with Microsoft to serve up ads on the popular social news service. Microsoft is replacing Google for serving up many of the ads you see on Digg's pages. The rest are provided by Federated Media, which also works with Digg to create special branded pages like the newly-updated Arc visualization in Digg labs.
Digg is claiming the move is about scalability, and positive reviews from Facebook who also uses Microsoft for their contextual advertising. What does this mean for you, the end user? According to Kevin Rose's post on the Digg blog, there will be "...no dancing monkey ads, and the design will remain uncluttered." Whew.
Elinor Mills over at CNET News.com has the full story.
I'm a sucker for data visualizations. I waxed poetic about Swivel, the site that's attempting to make data charts accessible and useful, and the things that are coming out of Digg's labs from Stamen Design continue to innovate and change the way users can interact with social sites.
This afternoon I've been glued to "Diggspose" , a mashup made in Adobe Flash that combines Snap.com's preview shots of Web pages with popular and upcoming stories on Digg.com. The result is a moving picture show of story thumbnails you can click on and manipulate. The moniker Diggspose is a nod to Mac OS X's Expose feature, which tiles thumbnails of active desktop windows--an effect that has been emulated in Diggspose with three quick cascading presets. Diggspose also pulls double duty as an extension of Diggspy, Digg's live feed of newly submitted stories. Using Diggspose, you can now watch this stream with thumbnails in real time, using a neat carousel effect.
The service is hosted by Yourminis, the single-page aggregation service. Expect several other neat and new visualizations for the popular user-generated site beginning on Thursday, when Digg unveils the top 10 finalists for its API visualization contest.
[via Digg]
Digg's stories show up as visual thumbnails. When you see one you're interested in, you can click it to go directly to the story, or hold control and click to go to its page on Digg.
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