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More than a week after news surfaced that the once popular site Digg was purchased for $500,000 by Betaworks, its new parent company said it will be rebuilding it from scratch in the next six weeks. And it wants your help.
“We are a startup team with ambitious principles and we need to move quickly,” according to the post on rethinkdigg.com. “The old Digg infrastructure was expensive and it afforded us little latitude to innovate and build at a fast clip. So four weeks ago, we set an a aggressive goal to move to a new infrastructure by August 1. We are starting with a fresh code base — it’s modern, it’s fast and it’s shiny and new.”
The team — made of 10 engineers, designers and editors by a team at News.me — said that “after an adrenaline and caffeine-fueled six weeks,” it plans to roll out the latest version.
“With this launch, we’re taking the first step towards (re)making Digg the best place to find, read and share the most interesting and talked about stories on the Internet — and we want your help.”
The company urges Digg fans to take a short survey to help it strategize the redesign. Questions range from evaluating the quality of stories on the homepage, if you would recommend the current version to a friend and what type of phone you own.
“We care because Digg represented the messiness of the Internet at its best,” the site said. “It showed us that, out of the noise and the clutter, between the lolcats and the Kim Kardashian stories, a passionate but uncoordinated group of strangers could come together to create something coherent and substantial.”
It continued: “Alone, each of these individuals had no following, but together they were able to capture a global audience with stories that the mainstream media had mistakenly deemed unimportant. Digg is worth protecting. To do that, we need your help, your input and your support.”
What would you like to see on the new Digg? What worked with the last version and what didn’t? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.
BONUS: Digg: The Rise and Fall of an Internet Darling
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Kevin Rose, Owen Byrne, Ron Gorodetsky and Jay Adelson start Digg, a community-based news aggregator, with a $6,000 investment from then 27-year-old Rose. The team dubbed the site “Digg” because dig.com was already owned by Disney.
Rose and Alex Albrecht start a weekly video broadcast titled Diggnation, where they discussed the top content from Digg as well as other humor. The podcast became a huge success, and the pair even took their show on the road to many tech conferences including SXSW.
Digg received $2.5 million in funding from Omidyar Network, Marc Andreessen, and Greylock partners.
As of June, 2006, Digg moved to expand its verticals beyond technology, to include science, world news, business, entertainment and video. The company is on the right track; in August, Rose is featured on the cover of BusinessWeek.
In September, Digg's staff receives an additional $1 million in startup funding, this time for their podcasting arm Revision3. The New York Post releases a study valuing Digg at $250 million.
Reports surfaced that Google was final talks to buy Digg for about $200 million. Although the purchase never happened, it showed how in demand Digg and its talent was.
Shortly after, Digg received $28.7 million from Highland Capital Partners, further helping their perceived value.
Digg released the DiggBar to ensure users who left their site would return. It put a small bar on the top of pages visited through Digg, allowing users to upvote or bury the story. Because it was somewhat invasive, it wasn't popular with users.
In an effort to increase advertising revenue while providing a seamless experience for users, Digg released ads that appeared on the homepage with the rest of the user-submitted content. The pieces were clearly marked as sponsored, and weren't a big hit with the site's users.
Digg made dramatic changes to its interface to counter its declining traffic numbers. Digg 4.0 spent more than a month in alpha testing, and it was released to much fanfare.
Digg's new version caused angry users to flee en masse, and turn to Reddit to vent their frustrations. The traffic numbers can be seen in this graph, courtesy of HitWise.
Additionally, Rose gave up his role as CEO, turning the reins over to former Amazon executive Matt Williams, who still retains the role. Rose said he would remain at Digg, but turn the "day to day" operations over to Williams.
Diggnation announces it will air its final episodes in January of the next year, marking an end to the six-year-long run. It had more than 400 episodes after the two-part finale ended.
Kevin Rose announced in a tweet that he was leaving Digg, after two days of rumors. “I’ll continue advising Digg [and serve] on the board of directors and taping Diggnation (as I have been since [Matt Williams] joined).”
Rose went on to work on his own startup company, MIlk, which put out only one app -- Oink -- before shutting its doors. He was then hired by Google almost a year later.
Digg was sold to Betaworks, a New York-based startup who focuses on news products. The price was reported as $500,000 originally, but CEO Matt Williams said that was only for the assets, and the number was higher.
With Rose gone and many of the Digg staff being folded into Betaworks, what will Digg's future hold?
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Could be wasting their time? The new start-up @favmonster looks like the modern and visual way to find faves and share with contacts.
I say the webs crying out for a new digg… It needs to become the place for breaking stories that people capture in the moment, or that thing that just happened that people can relate to… Twitter and Facebook have the biggest audiences but you have to be following to hear of it… Imagine if somehow you’re rewarded for posting something that becomes a big digg… mmm… nice idea – Let’s all get behind digg and make it what we want…!
Isn’t fan feedback what got them into this mess in the first place? It’s too late, Reddit has taken over what Digg used to be.
You know what? I was pretty happy with the old Digg. Then they fixed something that wasn’t broken, and now I’m perfectly happy with Reddit — as is, it seems, the rest of the Internet.
Agreed. Aside from the fact that Reddit is reallllly really slow.
Its awesome that at least feedback is being gathered – my 2cents: don’t forget the API – in fact do it API first! and we can help (http://www.3scale.net).
I fact wrote up some thoughts on that: http://www.3scale.net/2012/07/rethinking-digg-please-dont-forget-the-api/
It’s sad to see a company that received offer for millions in the end be sold for $500,000. They shouldn’t have broken something that was working and decided to do something new.