Once popular social news website Digg.com is changing its interface. Digg was a successful social networking site before its founder Kevin Rose brought the new version Diggv4 which was one of the biggest fail in the tech industry. See the old version of Digg.com that was live before the very recent interface changes down below.
After that fail, the new CEO was appointed and the company accepted they have done things wrong and will be rolling most of the changes back, which they did and some of their users came back.
Why Diggv4 failed?
Back when Diggv4 was launched, a month later Mashable conducted a web poll in which its readers by large showed their preference for the previous version of the site as version 3 bagged 78.4% of the total votes.
6 reasons for Diggv4 failure (via searchengineland)
Not only did the launch of Digg v4 mute the voice of the community and took a totally new direction, the new version of Digg offered no additional benefits rather took away most of the helpful and beloved features including:
- The Ability to See What You Have Submitted – People tend to use social news sites to bookmark things and look back as to what they liked/disliked and Digg.
- Favorites – Users could star items that they loved (even if they didn’t find and sumbit to Digg) and bookmark them for later consumption.
- Categories – Digg had started being predominately tech related news, but evolved into all types of news and featured many distinct categories (and the ability to block specific categories). The categories were condensed and users were subjected to all types of content during launch.
- Time Stamps – Appending a time and date shows how fresh an article is and these were mysteriously missing during launch. Time stamps are also missing in the new search feature which makes searching for current news difficult.
- Legacy Article Vote Counts – All of the existing votes on articles were removed and had zero Diggs. Looking back on popular stories sorted by the number of Diggs helped in searches and was a way of finding if great content had already been shared. Digg v4 broke the vote count on all stories on the site and off-site for those publishers who had implemented their buttons and badges.
- The Bury Button – This was the most flagrant offense in my eyes as it affirmed the change in direction of the site. The bury button allowed the community to degrade content that was not fit for Digg and gave the community a voice on content that was not acceptable and self-patrol.
But today digg has sent invitations to a limited poll of diggers (Chip hazard got an invite) to test their new interface. Before this there was no news that digg will be launching a new interface. In the new layout its more neat with a web 2.0 look with only one ad spot on the page.
This is the new profile page at digg.com:
This is yet to be posted on Digg itself, however we are still going through all of the design changes. Stay tuned as we shall definitely report more about the new interface of Digg.com in further posts.
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