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.
Real estate search and resource service Trulia has a new tool built by the guys at Stamen Design called Snapshot. It's built off of Microsoft Virtual Earth and shows off little clusters of homes all over a 2D map. It's been pitched as an "alternate" view of the Trulia real estate listings, but a better way to describe it is pure, unadulterated eye candy.
That's not to say it's without use though. You can sort out houses in your area by price tag, or simply when they were listed. Each house has a little photo thumbnail, and you can click on any item to take you right to its Trulia page. You can also just sit back and watch the tool scroll through houses automatically, which pop up and give you bits of information.
While I don't think this system will ever replace an advanced search that can narrow down homes you're looking for by how many bathrooms and closets each house has, Snapshot is a great way to re-create the feeling of exploration you can get by driving around neighborhoods and looking at what's for sale.
Stamen Design's previous project with Trulia was HindSight, a tool that shows you what's happened to certain areas of the world historically. While neat to look at, unless you lived in one of the places that was coded in, it wasn't very useful. This new tool is far better for people who want to use their eyes to look for a new place to live.
Check out housing listings in a really slick timeline of money and availability.
(Credit: CNET Networks)
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)
Circles indicating recent crimes committed in the area
(Credit: Oakland Crimespotting)Oakland Crimespotting is an amazing interactive map that provides comprehensive information about the latest crimes in the Oakland area. The presentation is fluid and seamless -- you can use the sliders to adjust the time span, zoom out to see a larger area, and select the crimes you want to see. You can even click on each crime to find out more information about it, like the date and time it was committed as well as the actual case number. There's also a way for you to set up crime alerts to be delivered to you via RSS or email.
This is a project by the folks over at Stamen Design, the guys who designed the Digg visualizers as well as much of Pownce, the latest social network cum microblogging service to hit the Web 2.0 scene. The crime information is collected via CrimeWatch, the City of Oakland Police Department's community crime mapping web site, and presented in a much more interactive and appealing way. You can read the more detailed technical information on how they did it over on Michal Migurski's blog.
They created the site because they felt the map-first approach is a much more natural way for people to navigate the crime information, and I have to say, I definitely agree. This is a perfect example of using Web 2.0 technologies for public service, and I only wish there were more of these.
[via Leslie Chicone's Pownce page]
Trulia is a real estate search and information service. Users can search for real estate by zip code, or by filling in various search parameters like size, cost, and building type. Trulia also integrates several social features like a way to track buying trends, and a real-estate focused question and answer service.
Today, they've teamed up with Stamen Design, the same folks who do the eye candy for Digg Labs, to create a really neat way to look at housing trends called HindSight. Their new tool is a mix between historical real estate data, and a heat map to show which properties are hot. When combined, it's a very interesting way to watch growth trends and movement in residential areas.
Users can track the spread of housing developments and popularity in various U.S. cities over time. The team designed Hindsight as a way to spark discussion, and get people thinking in new ways about residential regions and population trends. Even if you're not looking to buy a house in one of these areas, this stuff is very fun to watch.
This map of Miami shows when properties have popped up, which is tracked on a timeline below.
(Credit: CNET Networks)
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.
(Credit: CNET Networks)Digg's Labs section launched last year with new ways to visualize Digg activity. Last week BigSpy, a new visualization tool that's eye candy in the purest sense of the word, quietly popped up. New stories appear at the top of the page, which offsets the rest of the stories in a wavelike motion. The more popular a story, the larger it is and the bigger the "wave" it causes on other stories. It's a mesmerizing effect.
One of the other Digg Labs' tools, Stack, was also updated. Stack essentially shows the popularity of a story with columns of various heights. Each new Digg contributes to a story's height. With the update, you can now see newly submitted stories and easily see which ones are gaining in popularity. Neat.
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