Digg to Launch New Version on Monday
Friday, June 23, 2006
Digg.com, which now has 300,000 registered users and 8 million monthly visitors, is planning to launch a new version of their website (Internally known as, Digg v.3) on Monday, June 26. Richard MacManus of Read/WriteWeb and Michael Arrington of TechCrunch landed an interview with Digg founders, Jay Adelson and Kevin Rose, about the history of Digg, the amount of traffic Digg receives, and the release of the new Netscape.com, which launched last week.
Although we'll be seeing a new design of Digg, there will also be a number of new categories beyond technology. Topics will be grouped as "Containers", including technology, entertainment, gaming, science, world & business, and online video. These new topics will give us the chance to see whether Digg is popular enough to expand into other topics with the same passionate user-base that already inhabits Digg. The new Netscape.com, which retains editorial control of the content that is posted, already has expanded to 30 topics which range from Art & Design to Woman. Expanding Digg into other verticals is a very important process for Digg to become mainstream. However, I have my doubts that other topics will be as popular as the technology section. Also, Kevin Rose commented in the podcast that he thinks that the core users of Digg, the technology-focused readers, will be the ones participating in other groups. To your left is a screenshot of the Digg homepage when the user is logged out (Notice that technology is the default topic).Another new feature of Digg v.3 will be allowing users to deselect certain topics that don't interest them - Making the Digg experience far more personal. Lets say that you don't care for celebrity gossip (As do I), then you can filter it out and never see a story about celebrity gossip again (Ah, the advances of the Internet!). Digg also wants to become the number one stop for finding some of the most popular videos, such as on YouTube. Thankfully, the new version will also improve the friends area - You can now be alerted to content that friends have "agreed on".
Digg has over 300,000 users, as written above, and it is even started to be said that Digg gets more traffic than the New York Times. I suspect that the expansion into new news topics will only increase the number of users as well as the amounts of traffic Digg receives. The key to the success of these new topics will be the community that already surrounds Digg - If many users embrace the new topics, it'll be a huge success.
