After two days of silence, Digg has gone on the record to officially acknowledge the change in how its shortened links are redirected, as well as clear up how links will be handled in the future.
The change, which took place on Sunday, had links which once lead directly to a story's source, redirecting to Digg's story pages instead. The new behavior appeared only on stories that had been submitted to the site, leading to confusion on where users would go when they clicked on a shortened Digg URL.
In a post on Digg's company blog, CEO Jay Adelson explained that the new way of handling shortened URLs would remain in place. As a concession to early adopters, Digg URLs created before Tuesday would continue to link directly to the source. But going forward, all new links will retain the newer behavior of redirecting to Digg story pages, unless the page had never been submitted as a story, or the viewer is registered and logged in to Digg.com.
Despite how the the DiggBar and integrated shortening service were introduced to users earlier this year, Adelson said Digg never wanted to end up as a URL service provider.
"Our strategy with Digg short URLs is to facilitate sharing of Digg content, not to be a conventional redirection service," Adelson said. Digg founder Kevin Rose had said something along the same lines in a Sunday night appearance on Leo Laporte's This Week in Tech.
So far, the change has resulted in a lot of user distrust. Many people who used the service to shorten URLs have vowed never to use it again, while others simply chided the company for changing the behavior of links without first alerting users. Digg has caved to unhappy users in the past, but this change has more to do with Digg's business model than previous feature changes.
The DiggBar remains one of the company's most controversial features. While fervent users continue to use the service, it was initially a big turnoff for many publishers and casual users. Along with the structure of user comments, the DiggBar has endured a lot of changes since its inception, having had much of its functionality made optional after users and critics alike bashed its operating methods.
Still, the change in URL behavior serves several important purposes in moving Digg forward as a business. One is to get more page views and boost unique user counts from people who must first visit Digg's story pages before visiting the source story. Another is to grow user adoption of the DiggBar, since using it preserves the old way of clicking on links and going directly to the source.
Whether Digg will continue to change its functionality in order to push users toward enabling the DiggBar remains to be seen.
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.
The problem
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.
A feature that was once quite controversial, the DiggBar is now a rarity, unless users are registered with Digg and have opted-in to see it on Digg story links.
(Credit: CNET)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
Futz is a simple reminder and bookmarking service that lets you send sites, images, and notes to your e-mail or mobile phone via your browser's address bar. Registered users simply drop futz.me/USERNAME in front of any URL, image, or text and it gets sent as an e-mail, an SMS message, or both.
Users get granular control over the handling of text and links versus images, so you can keep images from being sent to your mobile phone (something that requires your phone to support MMS). Along with grabbing images that are already on the Web, the service can host them for you. If you've got one on your computer, you can drop in a special file command that lets you upload it from your hard drive.
What's really nice about the service (and potentially dangerous to in-box health) is that you can bookmark links and images without having to log in. That also means anyone who knows your username can save links or send you messages.
Futz reminds me a bit of Kwiry, which lets you save Web searches via SMS to view later. It's also reminiscent of Read It Later, in that it encourages you to view links at a later date. In either case, it's lacking one thing that both of those services have: a way to view and manage past items you've sent to yourself. Instead, you have to handle this in your e-mail client, which is not ideal.
Futz turns a few characters in your browser's address bar into an e-mail with the link, or any text you enter.
(Credit: CNET)
The new DiggBar is slightly smaller than the old one.
(Credit: CNET Networks)As announced last week, Digg relaunched its DiggBar feature late Tuesday, making it something that only appears for registered users, who are now able to turn it off completely. That new option shows up in Digg's user settings panel which means users can choose whether they feel like using it.
Along with the change, the company has also adjusted the DiggBar's behavior once you leave the site to go read a story. For one it's smaller, in an attempt to take up less space on sites you're visiting. Digg has also "temporarily" removed the view count, which showed users how many times the story had been read by Digg users.
John Quinn, Digg's vice president of engineering, says the removal of the view count was done simply because the actual tracking for that was being done on the DiggBar itself, and without counting clicks from unregistered Digg users (who will no longer be seeing the DiggBar) the number was no longer accurate. The company has undoubtedly been tracking the number of outgoing clicks a story gets for years (albeit internally), but did not design the view count to feed from that metric. I, for one found it one of the most useful features, since you could see how many views a story had received, regardless of the number of Diggs it had.
Registered Digg users who want to remove, or add back in, the DiggBar can now do so from the settings menu.
(Credit: CNET)
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's vice president of engineering continues to push that the DiggBar's done good things for both Digg and the sites it's linking to. In a company blog post on the upcoming changes, he notes that "roughly 45 percent of all Digging activity is now happening on the DiggBar," which means users are placing their votes off Digg's main site. Quinn also notes that a quarter of the users are using the DiggBar's related stories feature (which also appears on Digg's main site) along with a 10 percent increase in the number of shared, shortened DiggURLs.
Quinn also said that some of the things Digg has learned from the DiggBar will be put to use in the company's browser extensions, which means we could see the random Digg story link, and the number of page views a story has received inside of Digg's Firefox Toolbar.
John Gruber of the blog Daring Fireball doesn't like what Digg's doing with its DiggBar, and has come up with a relatively simple way to block it on his own site. By making a small change to his site's PHP files, any shortened DiggURL created for one of his pages will automatically take users to a separate page Gruber has created that chides the company.
In Gruber's opinion, the service, which automatically shortens a site's URL and adds some of Digg's features to the top of the source content, is bad for both users and sites. Gruber says it's tainting the purity of a site's URL, which also affects search engine optimization and the capability for users to easily bookmark content. "URLs are the building block of the Web. They tell the user where they are. They give you something to bookmark to go back or to share with others," he says.
But is Gruber right?
As for the SEO, John Quinn--Digg's vice president of engineering, came out on Thursday and said that Digg had been in touch with search engines like Google and traffic monitoring services like Comscore, Compete, Quantcast, and Nielsen prior to launching the DiggBar, and that pre-launch testing had shown that it was not, in fact, changing the accuracy of traffic numbers. In fact, in the week since launching, Quinn said that the DiggBar was giving both Digg and publishers a noticeable boost in traffic.
One area where Gruber has a point though is with user bookmarking and link identification. Many sites use URLs that contain the headline, or certain keywords about the story. For readers this is a quick way to figure out where a link is going. For Digg, part of the problem with this is that its users can completely rewrite the headline and description of a story when submitting it to the site, which means the last way to see what something is--prior to clicking on it, is to check the URL, which is what the DiggBar effectively kills.
While Digg retains the source of the story right in front of the description, along with the full URL on the DiggBar, it's also changing what users are seeing in their address bar, which is yet another place where users are used to figuring out where they are and what they're looking at.
So how does this factor into bookmarking, and more importantly--social bookmarking? For personal bookmarking, Digg is replacing a site's Favicon (yet another identifier) with its own, along with replacing the site's standard URL with a shortened Digg one. Add a few shortened Digg bookmarks to your own personal bookmarks and you'll see where this can hinder the capability to sort, and quickly parse saved links.
For social bookmarking, sites like Delicious merely show the hottest links by page title (something the DiggBar does not alter), however when browsing the URLs alone, yet again it's a sea of Digg.com links.
Where Digg may have to change its tune is in giving publishers a way to opt out of having their site URLs shortened, along with a way to keep the bar from showing up on the top of the page. If Digg were to meet publishers in the middle, and act like any other link shortening service out there (TinyURL, Bit.ly, et al) and convert the Digg URL into the site's normal URL, I think it would go a long way toward preserving the happiness of publishers who want to maintain their site's identity.
The launch of the DiggBar on Thursday was big news. Not only for URL-shortening services, but for the idea of one site bringing some of its features along for the ride, even when a user has left it to go somewhere else.
The idea is not new, though; some services have been doing it for years. We've put together a list of some of the big sites that do it, and why it matters.
Google/Ask/Yahoo/Live Image Search
Searching for images on Yahoo keeps the search UI with you, and gives you a quick way back.
(Credit: CNET )Searching for images on Google, Ask, Live, and Yahoo all bring along a framed toolbar, or a special framed bar that segments the content. When you click on an image from the results on any of these engines it keeps a little frame on the top of the page that gives you copyright and size information, along with a link to the full-quality version. More importantly though, it lets users start another search or simply hop back to the results page.
Why it's important: All routes go back to the search results--and more importantly, back to the ads that were on the page. If the company can get you to start another search, that's another ad impression. Also, from a user's point of view, it's comforting to have a quick breadcrumb trail to get yourself out of there if it's a page you didn't want to end up on, especially if it's coded to keep your back button from letting you leave the page.
Facebook's sneaky link bar is not as advanced as some of the others on this list, but lets you comment and share on outgoing links from the popular social network.
(Credit: CNET)Facebook has had a link sharing feature since late 2006. Only recently, however did shared links come with a navigation bar that comes with the users when they click off-site links. The bar includes who posted the item (in case you're passing along something one of your friends originally shared), as well as the option to add your own comment, or re-share it to your news feed or to other Facebook buddies.
Why it's important: Like what the search engines do for images, Facebook is doing for any link its users share. It simply adds some of Facebook's features like commenting and re-sharing, right on top of the site. It's a much bigger deal for Facebook users though, since for anything that needs a lot of real estate, they can check it out in its original location (read: out of Facebook's limited-size news feed), all without feeling like they've left the site.
... 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 see other stories that were dugg from the same news source. All the while, the user experience follows you and lets you hop back to Digg. This is also good for publishers because it keeps users on their site while they're doing these activities, which previously would have taken place back at Digg.com.
It also lets everyone in on how much traffic Digg is driving by showing how many views a story has gotten, which in most cases surpasses the number of diggs the story got. This was information that previously only Digg and the publishers were privy to.
The new "DiggBar" comes with you from site to site.
(Credit: CNET)Where Digg may get some heat for the DiggBar is with its inclusion of a "random" button that takes users to a random story on Digg. StumbleUpon, which pioneered this concept, has had the same thing for years, and more recently as part of its own software-free pervasive toolbar. Will Digg fans get on the company about this? Probably not, but it's worth noting that hopping to a random story has never been something you could do from Digg's own site, and as of now is only available on the DiggBar.
Two things that appear to be missing from today's release--and have been long promised, are support for Facebook Connect log-ins, and an improved search tool. Digg was announced as a Facebook Connect launch partner back in July of last year, and it's still not a part of the site. Jay Adelson has recently gone on the record with Wired and on his own Facebook page about an updated version of Digg's site search.
Here's Digg's demo of how it works:
DiggBar from Kevin Rose on Vimeo.
Update: This should now be live for all users. It looks like the shortened links were only showing up for a small portion before getting pushed out to everyone at around 4:30 PST. Also, to make a DiggURL link out of any site you can simply put a "Digg.com/" before any URL and it will be shortened for you. There's also a bookmarklet, which can be found on Digg's explanatory page.
Correction:This post initially misstated where sponsored results show up. Sponsored results show up in toolbar searches and Google.com searches only.
Google on Tuesday released a new version if its software toolbar for Internet Explorer. Included is a feature carried over from the company's desktop search product--a search box that runs whether or not you have your browser open. This special box sits next to the Start button on your taskbar, and lets you search the Web, your browser bookmarks, and any files and applications you have on your PC.
In a blog post, the company said this release is an attempt to put the focus back on search. More importantly, it's getting people to start a Google search whether or not they've got their browser open--giving the company more chances to serve up ads. Part of that is already apparent, as users get sponsored results through toolbar searches, just like they would when searching from Google.com.
The new quick search option puts a search box on your taskbar.
(Credit: Google )Other new features include the recently visited pages and bookmarks start page that first shipped with Chrome, then came to Firefox with its latest Google toolbar release. Google has also added its synchronization service, which will let you access your same Google bookmarks and autofill form information from multiple computers.
Users already running Google's desktop search program can turn off the quick search box, or use it as a replacement. Google has posted instructions for doing that here.
Google has launched a new option for site owners using its Friend Connect service. Besides the usual friends and discussion widgets, sites can now have a "social bar" which can sit atop, or at the bottom of their page. This facilitates user log-ins, as well as letting you get a quick view at the latest activity including members who have signed in and comments they've left.
Google is pushing the new bar as an alternative to putting some of the other Friend Connect page elements on your site. For instance, having this installed without the other widgets can keep the side navigation clear while still allowing users to log-in using their Friend Connect credentials. It also lets them see who's recently been on the page, and what those users have been interacting with.
You can see it action on this test site. Below is a demo video of how to drop it into your blog:
