Rose founded Digg in 2004, and Digg immediately became a hit, so much so that all big companies thought of acquiring Digg. Google had a pretty sweet deal going with Digg, estimated cost was some $200 million, however, Google didn’t go through with the deal at the last minute.

Then, came the age of Facebook and Twitter, which have pretty much dominated every other service on the internet. Digg lost substantial amounts of traffic. Kevin Rose, and the then CEO Jay Adelson has a fight, the result of which was that Kevin Rose stopped visiting the office for months in a row. Finally, Adelson was let go, and Matt Williams was hired as the new CEO of Digg.

However, it has been quite clear for sometime that Digg is least on Kevin Rose’s mind. He has been pretty active on a couple of other projects, but not on Digg. As far as the new startup is concerned, there are no details about that just yet. However, it has been said that Kevin Rose as closed a $1 million funding round of the yet to be announced startup.

Kevin Rose tweeted yesterday:

I’ll continue advising Digg / on the board of directors, & taping Diggnation (as i have been since @mwdigg joined)

What does the future hold for Digg and Kevin Rose? That, time will tell.

In Case You Missed It:

• Breaking News: Digg.com Changing Its Interface – Exclusive Screenshots!

First, the Digg team has made an announcement regarding the new interface on the official Digg blog:

This new design includes a new way to browse between the different sections of the site and an easier way to filter your content. We’ve simplified the design to make stories more prominent and easier to read. The newly organized profile page makes it a snap to see all your statistics. And last but not least, a new submission flow makes submitting stories easier. We couldn’t wait any longer to share these with our users and gather feedback before a public rollout, but there’s still a lot of work to be done.

The Digg team highlights 3 major features in their post:

1. A new design incorporating frequent suggestions from our community,
2. Everyone’s historical number of stories promoted to Top News as well as historical percentage of stories promoted to Top News, and
3. Optional on-site and email notifications when stories you submit or Digg are promoted to Top News.

One of the best things for hardcore diggers in this update is the fact that all user-stats from Digg version 3 have finally been imported, for which the Digg team has this to say:

Since launching V4, we’ve been working on importing data from V3 into our new system. It’s ended up taking much longer than we expected, and today’s push will reveal two important statistics: the number of stories each user has had promoted to Top News, and the percentage of stories they have submitted which have reached Top News.

Apart from all of the exciting new details, Chip Hazard has made another discovery, which comes in the form of a new tab on Digg.com by the name of Oatmeal. Yes, the Matthew Inman (Web designer/online marketer) owned site which is home to some of the most hilarious comics on the internet. However, Oatmeal is not exactly the most popular website on Digg.com as it merely had only 7 stories making the front page last month. Exclusive screenshot attached below.

Here’s the million dollar question: Can this be another strategically thought move that Digg is attempting for making money (to anyone who pays them and ignore the users) and possibly restore the large user base that they once touted? Obviously we shall have the answer when it is termed as either a nice, handsome pay off for the company or yet another potential fail.

Is this going to piss off what’s left of Digg.com’s users to move towards reddit.com, which already has capitalized much by the mistakes Digg has made in the recent past when it came out with Diggv4? Share your thoughts with us in your comments below.

We shall bring you more updates as they develop. Stay tuned!

In Case You Missed It:

• Breaking News: Digg.com Changing Its Interface – Exclusive Screenshots!
• Apple iPhone 5 In Hands Of AT&T For Beta Testing [EXCLUSIVE]
• Our First Post!

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.

In Case You Missed It:

• New Digg Interface Brings Back User-Stats From v3 – Features New Oatmeal Tab, Exclusive Screenshot !
• Kevin Rose Resigns From Digg, Hints Plans Of A New Startup