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)Photo-sharing site Zooomr began a second try Monday to launch its third-generation photo-sharing Web site, attempting to combine social-networking features with unlimited photo storage and, eventually, the capability for photographers to sell their own pictures.
Zooomr's new Zipline chat and status feature
(Credit: Zooomr)The new site, when available, features a Twitter-like interface called Zipline that lets members tell their contacts what they're up to and hear the same from those contacts, according to a video demonstration by co-founder Kristopher Tate. It also lets members join groups and subscribe to discussions.
Zooomr had attempted to fire up the Mark III site in March, but instead bugs and migration issues kept the site was unavailable for nearly a week. The start-up rolled back to the earlier version and postponed the upgrade.
Founder Kristopher Tate estimated the new relaunch would be done within 24 hours. He and Chief Executive Thomas Hawk appeared on a late-night video feed Monday holding a two-man launch party and answering questions. (Hawk likes both Pacifica and Rolling Rock beer, has a bachelor's degree in political science, and gets "in sort of this Zen state when I'm out there with the camera shooting.")
Zooomr has had a rocky few months. Shortly after the relaunch snafu, its investor pulled out its money when the start-up's cash flow turned positive. That's delaying some new hardware purchases.
Then, just before Monday's second relaunch attempt, a database hard drive crashed and Tate and Hawk had to drive from San Francisco to Silicon Valley in the middle of the night to repair it.
Newsvine, an increasingly popular news aggregation and community content publishing site, re-launched yesterday, re-branding its front page as a single page aggregator. Users can now add and re-order content modules such as weather, sports tickers, and photo slide shows. They can also add RSS feeds from external Web sites (like ours). According to the team's blog post, the addition of modules was the most commonly requested feature by users.
The change has put Newsvine in the running as a single-page aggregator, a crowded area we took a look at last month. While Newsvine doesn't seem to pose an immediate threat to some of the big players like Netvibes and Pageflakes, it's the only single-page aggregation service available that has a community of people creating and sorting written content in the same place--something that's likely to make users return.
The new front page of Newsvine has modules that can be moved around. Users with wide-screen displays also can extend it out to the sides.
(Credit: CNET Networks)The Zooomr photo-sharing site plans major changes, including the ability to let members sell their photos, but the upgrade process has been rocky.
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Zooomr)
Photo-sharing sites have added features such as tagging, commentary, ranking and printing. But adding the ability to sell photos injects a little profit motive in the business as well. It also puts the site in more direct competition with stock-photo sales sites such as Getty Images subsidiary iStockphoto.
Zooomr will keep 10 percent of revenue from photo sales, the company said on its blog, letting users keep 90 percent. For comparison, iStockphoto keeps 80 percent, unless users sign an exclusivity agreement under which the company keeps 60 percent. Getty also acquired journalism-oriented Scoopt this month, a site that splits revenue 50-50.
Zooomr went offline Tuesday for the overhaul to the Mark III version of the site. Users couldn't upload new images, though blog photos hosted on the site were still available. The upgrade was scheduled to be complete Thursday, but on Sunday, Zooomr rolled back to the earlier interface while debugging the new one.
"To keep everyone happy and continually uploading images, we've opted to put Zooomr Release Two back up temporarily for a few days while we get all of these Mark III bugs worked out of our system," site programmer Kristopher Tate said in a blog posting Sunday.
New search abilities also hampered the upgrade. The new version will let users search for images based on their colors, but even with five servers working flat-out, processing images for the search preparations took longer than expected, Tate said.
Zooomr today specializes in photo sharing augmented with support for multiple languages and geotagging, which maps the locations where photos were taken. The new Zooomr version also lifts file-size and quantity limits, the company said on its blog. And it will be endowed with a programming interface, allowing more sophisticated or automated interactions with the site.
Disney.com unveiled its new look this morning. Announced last month at CES by CEO Bob Iger, the new Disney.com aims to bring more personalization to the site and cash in on provide Disney content to share with others. Funny thing is, you can't even share the content on outside sites like MySpace or blogs.
(Credit:
CNET Networks)
It's downright tough to find the new personalized area of Disney.com, but it's called XD. The Flash-based XD interface takes about half a minute to load, and you're greeted to a smattering of widgets featuring Disney content that appears automatically depending on what "channel" you're on. What's strange is that all of the channels and content are kid-centric, despite the Iger's claims that the site would tailor its content by age demographic. Maybe Disney is intending on rolling that out in the future. For now, expect to find out what's happening on That's So Raven instead of juicy details on love triangles and smoke monsters on Lost.
Maybe the most disappointing aspect of the Disney revamp is how long it takes to load. While it looks kind of pretty once it's done, eye candy can only go so far. I can understand the XD features taking a while since it's loading a giant Flash player, but it took around 10 seconds to fully load the home page from a really fast connection. For dial-up users, there's a lite version of the site, but I'm a firm believer in making good first impressions with quick-loading front pages for everyone.
The lack of sharing for the XD widgets is disappointing. It's that same "walled garden" mentality that AOL is just now beginning to let go. Protecting content is one thing, but providing it online for free with such tight restrictions is bad form in the age of widgets and YouTube. Hopefully Disney will open (and speed) things up in the coming weeks.
(Credit:
CNET Networks)
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