Hey, I’m Veronica. I’m part of the team that’s bringing community and conversation back to the new Digg. You might be wondering what we’ve been up to. You might not. Either way, I’m going to tell you! When we rebuilt and relaunched Digg three years ago (ah, #tbt!) we shelved pretty much all of the community features. Our sense was that Digg’s community had almost entirely disappeared. We decided to strike out in a different direction, until the time seemed right to bring conversations back in. A few months ago, our designers and developers started to build.
In the past couple of weeks, lots of people have been talking about what makes a good (and bad) community. For our part, we threw some pointed questions out to Digg’s users, especially since we’re in the middle of building community features. Last week, about 1,500 of you were nice enough to fill out a short survey. The feedback was incredibly helpful and interesting.
Here are a few things we learned from the survey:
- 70% of you are interested in commenting on Digg. - The second-most-requested feature was commenting and discussion across all Digg users, not just existing connections imported from Twitter and Facebook. - You want to follow topics. - You love reading about tech and science.
To me, the question that produced the most interestingly overwhelming response was this one:
In a lot of the Reddit coverage, and in the broader discussion about community and commenting, there’s been an increased focus on the connection between “free speech” and the integrity of a community. What we learned from our survey is that the integrity of community starts with clear community guidelines. What we heard from you is that reasonable rules aren’t a problem, but clarity and consistency of application matter a ton. These are the kinds of things we’re thinking about a lot as we build these new features.
A bunch of you left us some notes at the end of the survey. I’d like to address a few of them:
“If you do go through with creating a comment system, I really urge you to focus on a system that puts an emphasis on a few high quality comments and discussions rather than a raucous free-for-all.” This is something that we’ve heard a lot! We want to encourage interesting, thoughtful and smart conversation. This is why we’re building something that is not too invasive or in-your-face.
“I would be careful when changing anything on the homepage–the simplicity and layout really work!” Rest easy, my friend. The front page will remain the same for users who’d rather not participate in a Digg community.
“I love digg, no matter what my friends say.” Who are your friends? Tell me. Tell me who said mean things to you.
“The propensity to present stories (the repeated “Attack on Titan” trailers come to mind) that seem to be of interest to the Digg editors but it’s not actually “what the internet is talking about.” It feels like an agenda is being forced upon us.” I’d like to take this opportunity to state that Digg is strictly pro-anime. But seriously: Yes, we love Attack On Titan, but our numbers show that our users do too! This is why we keep posting new trailers. Our editorial team uses a ton of data signals (in addition to their very smart brains) when selecting stories for the front page.
This conversation is far from over. If you missed out on this survey, we still want to hear from you. Join our beta tester list to get updates on our progress. Did we miss something in the survey or in this post? Should we be watching better anime? Do you just want to talk to someone? Email us: feedback@digg.com or leave a comment below.
So the Digg team is working feverishly to design and build a wave of new features and capabilities. We’d like your help! If you’re interested in weighing in, giving us your input and guidance, testing beta products, or just keeping tabs as things get ready for launch, please join Digg’s Beta Testers list. For starters, we’ll send you a basic survey asking questions about how you use Digg and what you’d like to add. (We’re also asking, optionally, where you live, as we’d like to organize a couple of meetups with interested folks).
It’s time to add conversations, dialogue, and social features back into Digg, and we want to do it in the right way – with your input.
For the past few months my lovely coworkers have been asking me to write a blog post about how Digg uses Tumblr because our blog has been ~*killing it*~ lately. I mean, look at it. I ignored these emails for as long as I could, but here we are.
In 2012, Digg was essentially a one-page site. There were no landing pages beyond the front page, so the point of social media — sorry in advance for all the buzzwords — was to get Digg homepage content in front of unique audiences on different platforms. Actually, that’s still the point of social media at Digg. Sure, traffic is great, but for now it’s an added bonus since we still link out to other websites the vast, vast majority of the time.
So what does this have to do with Tumblr? Everything, actually.
When I started our Tumblr blog two years ago, there was no strategy. I just thought: I am a person who uses Tumblr. If Digg were a person, how would Digg use Tumblr? That’s it. There were no meetings, no analytics, no corporate meddling. Just a blog. And while no, it’s not responsible for a huge percentage of our traffic, we do have a nice following and have had a ton of awesome interactions with the beautifully insane Tumblr community. It’s been a little over two years and I’m happy to report that not one person at Digg has told me that, despite it not being a big traffic driver, Tumblr is not a worthwhile use of my time.
In February, Tumblr accounted for just a fraction of our overall traffic (still more than Twitter!), but that traffic is not the only way to measure success, especially with Tumblr. Instead, like most Tumblr users, I measure success in likes and shares. In fact, one of the luxuries of working at an awesome place like Digg is that using your time to grow something that won’t ever lead to an increase in traffic is totally okay.
That brings me to the reason for even writing this blog post. I’m supposed to talk about what’s “working” for Digg on Tumblr. I can’t even count the number of times I’ve been asked by people how to “hack” or “game” Tumblr. There are a few publishers like Mic, NPR and Buzzfeed (off the top of my head) that have awesome blogs and this is solely because the people who run them are Tumblr users themselves. They understand the language of the ever-changing Tumblr community. So, no, I don’t have any Tumblr “hacks” but I can share a few things that have worked for us with no guarantee that they will work for you:
1) Make sure the person or people who run the blog actually use Tumblr. And I mean really use it (not just say they use it because they signed up for it once). My colleague Joe and I split this responsibility.
2) Screenshots of headlines coupled with GIFs to tease a video (or just screenshots of headlines with no GIF) is the main way we’ve been able to lure users away from their precious dashboards and onto Digg. But again, we consider this an added bonus, not a goal.
4) Tumblr’s explore page just got a nice makeover. Tagging your posts correctly will help people find them. People have also used tags as an extension of the posts themselves. Like this.
5) Take the time to follow real people and reblogcoolshit. It’s not all about you!
That’s it! Those are our tips, hacks or whatever else you want to call it. Know your audience and respect the awesome people that make up the Tumblr community before you try to wrangle them up and make them click on your damn links!
A little more than a year old, Digg Video is pretty great. From out of the endless weeds of the Internet we have cultivated a wonderful garden of videos you actually want to see, from timely and important news pieces to bizarre endeavors plucked from uncanny corners of YouTube and beyond.
But what if you want to sit back and enjoy Digg’s expertly curated videos but you DON’T want to get popcorn butter all over your keyboard?
That button pulls the video up into the Digg TV player:
Sit back and enjoy your full-screen, autoplaying video experience, organized by channel or your own collection of saved Digg videos.
When you click on Explore, you’ll see the full range of Digg Video’s human-curated, topical channels:
Digital video is getting better — the viewing experience should be too. Most videos are presented amidst clunky interfaces or inline in articles, and, even if you go fullscreen, when your video is over you need to hunt for the next. YouTube playlists are fine, but run up against the exact problem that Digg is built to solve: there is a lot of crap out there. Can someone please curate the good stuff? Thanks for asking, Internet. We can. We did. We have some suggestions.
When you’re feeling serious, check out Documentary, Short Film, or Science. For laughs, click Funny or Cute. When you’re hungry, Food. When curious, try Curious. Feeling handy? How-to. Retro? Histories. In a creative mood? We’ve got videos on Architecture, Art, Books, Culture, Design, and Photography. Need for speed? Cars or Aviation. Looking for action? Sports. (Or Lust). Feeling love for your fellow humans? Cities. Sick of your fellow humans? Nature or Animals. Too tired to type “TMZ” into your browser? We’ve got excellent videos about Movies, TV, and Fame, along with great clips from Late Night. When you’re awash in self-loathing, we recommend Gross. (Or Politics). And when you’re feeling unable to escape how everyone still treats you like an adolescent, perhaps a dose of Animation or Comics.
Watching video online is rapidly chipping away at the mammoth time sink of humanity that is Big Media-provided broadcast television. According to Nielsen (report), over the last year alone millennials watched 20% less traditional TV and 33% more digital video than just the year before. (Whoa, right?) We want to help accelerate that trend by making it much easier to find, and more fun to watch, the videos Digg finds and curates.
Digg TV is still in beta. Tell us what your greedy little eyeballs desire. Some features that may come depending on how much you want it:
· Use your phone as a remote control · Support more video sources (currently only YouTube and Vimeo are supported) · Save videos from anywhere on the Internet and watch them on Digg TV · Integrate with Apple TV, Chromecast, and other streaming dongles and boxes
Digg already has the entire Internet running through our blood. There are many excellent videos out there. Witness them in Digg’s new TV mode.
At the start of a new year, it’s tech company tradition/neurosis to do a swan dive into the previous year’s data in search of sunken treasures — patterns or insights that escaped notice in the daily rush of site metrics and KPI reports. I’ve been doing that over the past week, and thought it might be interesting to lift Digg’s hood and show some of our internal numbers from 2014. TL;DR: Digg had a terrific year, accelerating as the months progressed.
By way of background, we’re pursuing an unconventional strategy at Digg. Armed with a data infrastructure and some smart algorithms, Digg has editors — actual human beings — curate the most interesting stories and videos on the Internet and deliver them, as an act of judgment and with some degree of wit, to our users via our homepage, our iOS and Androidapps, the Daily Digg email, and a rangeofsocialchannels. We think of our users as those who speak Internet — people who spend a fair amount of time online, who are curious, and who love news and great writing, as well as eye-catching videos. In short, those who want to learn and explore, and who enjoy both the highs and lows of Internet culture. For these people, the Internet is both wonderful and often utterly overwhelming — an endless scroll of stories, videos, blog posts (e.g., the one you’re reading), tweets, status updates, infographics, shared photos, gifs, alerts, and so on. Digg’s mission is to make sense of it all, to distill that vast daily river down to its most interesting and noteworthy gems. Tackling that problem from multiple angles, we also build awesome automated tools like Digg Reader and Digg Deeper that help our users navigate, manage, and make sense of their Internet.
It’s an amazing era for readers and watchers of creative work on the Internet. There are so many fantastic sites and apps generating great writing and compelling videos. But amid the resulting clamor for audience and attention, we’ve seen plenty of less edifying behavior — clickbaiting,churnalism, cut-and-paste repackaging of others’ work. Those sites tend to crash and burn.
We’re building Digg for the long term. We believe in quality. We’re making a bet that the future lies in driving attention by being smart and useful, not conjuring or regurgitating linkbait. Our goal is to send users out to what’s interesting, without cynicism, trickery, or favoritism. So we’ve been asking quantitative questions about the user experience at scale: How many people use Digg, our homepage, the apps, email, Digg Reader, Digg Deeper, social, etc.? How long do they spend on Digg, which parts, and how often? What do they read, what do they click, what do they ignore? When are they active, and where? Why are they at Digg, and what can we do to make it a more useful and enjoyable experience?
On to the 2014 numbers.
The Basic Number: Monthly Active Users
Let’s start with our most important metric. Here’s a graph that shows the growth in monthly active users (MAUs), quarter by quarter since Digg was relaunched by betaworks:
These are MAUs across all our channels (web, mobile, mobile web, email, social), as best we’re able to accurately account for them. We do a quarterly average in order to iron out seasonal changes and determine the overall trend. The Q1 2015 number is based on January performance.
While I’ve been happy to see strong, steady MAU growth over the year, I’m especially happy that the growth has been organic. While all our channels have been scaling, what’s notable is that direct traffic continues to dominate over search, social, and referral. Even at current scale, around 70% of our web traffic comes direct. This is a testament both to the Digg brand and to our ability to build products that users want to share with their friends. Digg in 2015 represents what the Internet is talking about, and a lot of people type our domain into their browsers and search engines each day. This was all accomplished without marketing: other than a few thousand dollars spent on one-off Facebook experiments, growth has been organic.
Social traffic
We get a lot of inbound traffic from Facebook and Twitter, and we drive a lot of activity there too. In just the last week, for example, about 600,000 Facebook users liked, commented, shared, or clicked on our posts. Since January 1, we’ve seen more than 3.5 million clicks from Facebook. Much of this has been on Digg videos. Generally, we’ve been getting better at Facebook, as you can see. You’ll also note that (a) during our first year, our Facebook activity was so small, it’s barely visible on the chart below, and (b) December 2013 was a huge outlier month, right after we launched Digg Video, to what seemed to be ardent (but fleeting) love from Facebook’s newsfeed algorithm.
Our total Facebook reach in the past week was slightly more than 7 million users — all organic. Over on Twitter, we’ve got a healthy 1.5 million followers.
Tumblr is also a significant social channel for us. We launched Digg’s blog on Tumblr in December 2012. By December 2014, we had 711,700 active users (“curators” in Tumblrese, meaning users who have liked, shared, or commented on a Digg post in that month); so far in January, we’re at 788,031. Tumblr’s often regarded as a pretty contained ecosystem, so we’re particularly proud of our success there.
On Vine, we have 24,400 subscribers; across Vine, we’ve triggered 30,849,284 loops.
Digg Video tends to do disproportionately well on social networks, confirming the truism that arresting video is the most share-worthy thing on the Internet. The all-time biggest video on Digg — “What You Get When You Pour Molten Aluminum Into An Ant Hill” — garnered more than 32 million views, most of them triggered by Facebook shares. Just this week, Digg Video has gotten more than 1 million views on an insane archery video that, I have to stress, you must watch. (Seriously, stop reading this for a minute and watch that video. Lars Andersen is a beast.)
As an aside, these types of super-performing videos are responsible for some of the month-to-month peaks and valleys of traffic on Digg. In December 2013, the aluminum anthill video pushed Digg’s MAUs up over 15 million; in October 2014, a couple of strong videos brought MAUs back over 10 million; and it looks like this month, January 2015, will also end well above 10 million.
Digg is a complicated site to measure. On the one hand, we want to send our users efficiently elsewhere, as rapidly as they find interesting things to read or watch. On the other, we want them to stick around, and return often. The Digg homepage is something users check frequently, but it’s goal is to send them away; Digg Reader and Digg Deeper are products users keep open all day. There’s a similar dynamic with our mobile and tablet apps. So we look to a bunch of different metrics, gathered by multiple analytics tools.
We track an internal metric of “reads,” which combines clicks (web, mobile, email, but not social) plus the number of stories read in Digg Reader. In 2014, we enabled between 2.5 to 3 million reads a day, give or take.
We track user engagement. Among Digg’s web users, the average session duration in 2014, measured by Google Analytics, was 4 minutes and 16 seconds (i.e., not bad!).
We close pay attention to how users get to Digg. Our ~70% direct traffic rate has remained pretty consistent even as Digg has more than tripled its MAUs.
And a fundamental metric for Digg is user loyalty. Looking at Chartbeat, 2014 visitors to the Digg homepage, video pages, and Digg Reader were 51.5% “loyal users,” 30.9% “returning users,” and 17.5% “new users.” (A “loyal user” is a user who has visited Digg 8+ of the last 16 days; a “returning user” is a user who who has visited Digg less than 8 times in the last 16 days; and a “new user” is visiting Digg the first time in the past 30 days.)
Digg Deeper
One of our most interesting product launches in 2014 was Digg Deeper, which turns a social stream like Twitter into a high-value list of the very most-shared links among your friends, updated in real time. Effectively, Digg Deeper is your Twitter friends recommending the links they collectively think you should pay attention to. Feature-wise, it’s pretty great. Personally, I love being able to see my friends’ tweeted comments on each story. Rather than scroll endlessly to read disjointed tweets about a given story, Digg Deeper pulls it all together into a cohesive and digestible snapshot. Since we launched in August, sign-ups have been solid and steady, though not huge — more than 150k in all. Digg Deeper users do, however, tend to be obsessive.
Revenue & How to Grow It
A major Digg workstream for 2014 was to get consistent revenues from advertising. By December, we were doing exactly that. We have been very deliberate about monetization — we want to do it in a way that fits our user experience, delivering something genuinely valuable to users. Our primary ad unit is a sponsored post called “Startups We Digg,” “Apps We Digg,” “Pants We Digg,” “Groceries We Digg,” etc., depending on the thing being sold. It’s what some would call a native ad, meaning that it fits into the look and feel and editorial tone of the site (though clearly marked as an ad, of course!). We run only one sponsored post a day, and it’s always a product or service that the Digg team is genuinely into. (Check them out.) They are primarily sold as performance-based ads, aimed at companies selling products, services, or subscriptions that fit the Digg audience of Internet lovers, media junkies, and early adopters.
In 2015, the challenge is to couple user and product growth with the right monetization experience, one that moves with the grain of our product experience — one that speaks Internet, and that scales. Specifically, we aim to grow revenues overall (more than 3x); to introduce new ad options, particularly for brand and entertainment advertisers; to test and decide on mobile and email ad options; and to prove that we can scale without dropping in quality or messing up Digg’s clean and uncluttered user experience.
The Return of The Digg Effect
The Digg Effect describes the surge in traffic that hits a publisher when one of its stories makes it to the Digg homepage. (It’s a flavor of the Slashdot Effect). More broadly, that dynamic is what makes Digg, with its cross-cutting, low-cost, high-leverage curation model, a valuable contributor to the online publishing ecosystem. People visit Digg to see what’s interesting and noteworthy from across the Internet; in turn, publishers that produce great work benefit from a wave of readers who might not otherwise have seen it.
Though we’ve certainly not (yet) returned to the towering heights of the old Digg circa 2007, publishers are once again noticing a potent Digg Effect. Though most publishers don’t talk publicly about their traffic stats, we saw a steady flow of posts and Tweets noticing its return. Here’s a few:
You might be surprised to learn that content site Digg was our third largest source of traffic [this] year, surpassing Reddit and Google Search. …. Under Betaworks’ stewardship, editors and algorithms (instead of users) now choose which articles are on the front page. Digg has a clean design, very interesting articles, and appears to be blossoming in its second act. — Priceonomics
Wow, really interesting to see: Being on the front-page of @digg still drives great traffic. — Leo Widrich
Can I just say that I’m blown away that @digg is the third largest referrer to my Thoughts on Google+ post? — Chris Messina
You can always tell when Digg or someone similar picks up on a @mosaicsciencepiece — traffic shoots up 500%. — Mun-Keat Looi
Looking ahead, 2015 is going to be a year marked by scaling and major product launches. We’ve built a data platform and a custom content management system called Canvas that undergirds a fairly efficient and high-leverage business. We have a low cost-per-read / cost-per-view / cost-per-click — a thin layer of editors sitting atop an awesome set of social-data-rich crawling, sorting, ranking, scoring, and flagging tools. To give you a sense of scale, Digg’s editorial team consists of just six people who, as a team, work nearly 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. In 2014, that small team curated 22,013 homepage stories, 3,344 videos, and 227 originally-written pieces.
So even with the expense of editors on top of our data infrastructure and CMS, we have figured out how to effectively curate a vast and overwhelming Internet for a sizable and coherent audience. With the benefit of our existing technology stack, we think our model of [editors + algorithms] is one that can efficiently be scaled to other languages and other parts of the world. And so that’s one thing we’re going to pull off this year.
We live in a world where there is a vast oversupply of things to read, creators clamoring for your attention. One thing that is scarce, and highly valuable, is awesome curation. Digg provides awesome curation, plus clean design, a witty voice, and a bunch of useful tools and products.
To become more useful to our users — more enjoyable as well as more essential — we’re starting to incorporate social features, bringing some of the best dynamics of the old Digg back into the new Digg. With Digg Deeper, we’ve now started to bake personal connections and conversations back into our products. We’ve heard from many readers that they want to be able to see what their friends are digging, and to spark or join conversations with friends about those links. The evolution of Digg in that direction is going to accelerate dramatically in 2015. The trick, as always, is to add feature depth to Digg without overcomplicating the simple design that’s appealed to our readers.
In sum: Lots to come; watch this space.
P.S.: Can’t fail to mention this: We’re hiring! Android lead, mobile dev, front-end, back-end, platform engineers, dev/ops, editorial, revenue/sales, and more. Check out the Digg Jobs page.
It’s been a while since we’ve let you, the faithful Digg user, in on what we’ve been doing with our mobile apps. While we’re putting the finishing touches on a huge update to our Android app, here’s an update on what we’ve been building into the Digg iOS app.
1. An Even Better Digg Deeper
We love Digg Deeper, and so do our users (not a Digg Deeper user? Go on and sign up. You really won’t be disappointed. No, seriously, I’ll wait…) Digg Deeper not only boils your Twitter feed down to an ever-evolving shortlist of the top stories and videos your friends are sharing, it also lets you easily see the Twitter conversation about them.
To make it a better experience to read and dive into — both on the web and in our iOS app — we’ve added more avatars, larger images, better typography and a better Tweet viewer.
2. More Ways To Share
Our tools help you find great stories and videos, and take them with you wherever you go. Which is why, in addition to read-it-later services like Instapaper, Pocket and Readability, we support saving links to Pinboard, Delicious and Bitly, as well. You can even sign into these accounts using logins and passwords saved in 1Password.
3. Better Notifications
To keep you up-to-date with what’s happening on Digg, we’ve added actionable push notifications and a great new slide down notification alerting you to new content. Our objective is to make sure you’re up to speed: no muss, no fuss.
4. Much, Much More
Oh, and we’ve smashed bugs, improved scrolling speed, made it faster to load, added settings for the Digg Deeper Daily Digest emails, improved our Today Extension and more.
If you haven’t tried the Digg iOS app, you can, nay, should, download it in the App Store. And if you don’t want to take our word for it, take Apple’s: the Digg iOS app was just named a best iPad app in a whole bunch of countries around the world.
And just a heads up, we’re currently underway with a redesign and rewrite of large parts of the iOS app planned for early next year.
Last month we launched Digg Deeper, a useful feature that automagically identifies the most rapidly trending stories and videos among the people you follow on Twitter.
Today, we’re excited to launch a set of new and awesome elements to Digg Deeper:
1. Digg Deeper in Digg Reader
First, we’re adding Digg Deeper into Digg Reader (try saying that 10 times fast). You can now use Digg Deeper to scan the most-shared stories, videos and links from your Twitter connections. It’s an amazing way to see the most important stories currently trending among your friends and followers. Check it out.
2. Digg Deeper on iOS
Second, we’re launching an updated iOS app with Digg Deeper. You see which of your friends shared each story, and read their Tweets about it. It’s an amazing way to get the collective recommendations of your friends, and then quickly scan what they had to say. You can also opt to get push notifications each time Digg Deeper detects a trending story. Download the iOS app.
3. Daily Digest email
Third, we’re adding a Daily Digest email for Digg Deeper. Up until now, we’ve offered optional real-time Digg Alerts for the most-shared stories and videos among your friends. The Daily Digest is an email option that pulls together all your Digg Deeper links into a single place and delivers them, once a day, to your inbox. (Subscribers to the old News.me daily email often raved about how useful this can be; we think you’ll agree.) Go to Settings to turn on the Digg Deeper Digest.
Why Digg Deeper?
When betaworks took over Digg back in 2012, our first move was to re-imagine and relaunch the Digg homepage. We wanted to answer the same core question that brought users to Digg — “What are the most interesting stories on the Internet right now?” — but in a new way. Rather than relying solely on social signals like the Digg button (which had proven increasingly problematic as Digg grew and matured), a small editorial team used a range of data-driven tools to identify interesting stories and videos and then applied their judgment to compose a rapidly-evolving homepage, complete with saucy headlines and captions. The first product of the rebooted Digg, then, was recommendations: editors turning the cacophony of the Internet into a small set of the day’s best stories, presented in a clean and visually arresting web page, mobile apps and daily email.
The second big product area was Digg Reader, which delivers users a fast, efficient, up-to-the minute way to keep up with their favorite sites, blogs and other online sources, via a web-based reading dashboard, along with iOS and Android mobile apps. In addition to full-scale, reverse chronological feed reading, Digg Reader provides an innovative tool to sort posts by popularity.
As of last month, we added a third big product: Digg Deeper, where we turn your Twitter account into real-time content recommendations and alerts from your friends and followers. It’s a great way to turn your often-overwhelming social streams into low-volume, high-value feed from the people and channels you trust.
As always, we welcome your feedback, suggestions, and feature requests. Email our CTO, michael@digg.com.
When you sign up, our algorithms will begin surfacing the most compelling, and highly-discussed stories and videos from your endlessly overwhelming Twitter feed. You’ll see these stories and videos — as well as which friends and outlets shared them — displayed in a new personalized section of the Digg homepage.
You can also have everything sent to you directly via email alerts and mobile notifications, as frequently or infrequently as you want. For you iOS users, we just released an updated version of our app that includes Digg Deeper alerts.
So why use Digg Deeper? Think of it as having your own personal team of Digg editors who alert you to the most important things from your Twitter universe so you don’t ever feel that you’re missing anything. And unlike our real editors, it’s free.
We’ll be building lots of additional features in the coming weeks and months, including a personalized daily email and an expandable version of Digg Deeper on the homepage. We’ll also be working to incorporate Digg Deeper into Digg Reader (say that ten times fast).
In the meantime, we want to hear your feedback and requests. Please leave them in the comments, or email them to Digg’s CTO Mike Young at michael@digg.com.
Hey, Digg is launching something new today! Well, not exactly “new.” It’s something we built a few years ago as News.me, only this new version is highly evolved, and better than ever.
Behold: Digg Deeper. A way to see, in real time, what your friends think are the most interesting things to read and watch. Each day, Digg’s editors distill the Internet down to its finest, funniest, and fail-iest (if that’s not a word, it should be) essence. With Digg Deeper, we’re taking that one step further by alerting you to the best stories coming straight from the people and sources you trust most, starting with those you follow on Twitter.
What You Get
Once you log in, our monstrous supercomputers will comb through your Twitter timeline to isolate the links your friends are discussing the most. (We’ll be adding other social sources soon.) You can see the results, in real time, three ways:
The magic ingredient is the way we analyze your Twitter feed to determine the right threshold for your alerts. For example, one component of the algorithm measures the activity around every link in your feed. If you follow tons of accounts that are linking to many hundreds of stories a day, you might get an alert when 5 friends share the same link. But if you follow only a handful of accounts, you might get an alert when just 2 friends share that link.
Getting Off The Ground
We’re starting with invitations to our faithful, longtime News.me subscribers. Once we feel like things are stable and we’ve worked out the bugs (the ones that aren’t features, of course), we’ll lift the gate and let everyone in.
We’re thrilled to announce the launch of the Digg Channel on IFTTT. If Digg is what the Internet is talking about, then IFTTT will only make it easier to get this conversation to you quickly and conveniently. Because talk is cheap and we’ve all got dance competitions to watch.
What Is IFTTT?
IFTTT is a simple service that lets you create powerful connections between your favorite websites with one simple statement: “If This Then That.” Want to send the articles you save from Digg to your Instapaper? Done, thanks to IFTTT. Need to get the most Dugg video emailed to you every day? We’ve got you covered. Most of your favorite services like Tumblr and Pinboard already have IFTTT channels, so now you can easily send the best Digg content to wherever you consume the Internet.
IFTTT And Digg Reader
Since we launched Digg Reader, we’ve been inundated with requests to include one-click actions that integrate third-party tools like Buffer and Evernote. With today’s launch, you’ll be able to activate a recipe that sends all your Diggs and Saves to your favorite service instantly.
And because we know you’re busy, here are two recipes to help you get started.
IFTTT And The Digg Homepage
Originally, we were only going to build triggers for stories you’ve Dugg and Saved, but we soon realized that you can do much more with the Digg IFTTT channel. As a result, we’ve created some useful triggers that reduce information overload and give you only the content you want. For example, IFTTT can email you any stories that Digg puts up related to Ukraine. Not into geopolitical conflict? Pick your own keyword in the recipe below. May we suggest “dog”?
We’ll continue to add more IFTTT triggers and actions in the future and, as always, we’d love to hear your ideas. Tweet at us or email us at support@digg.com.
Now, head over to our channel on IFTTT and get started with our popular recipes or create your own. We’d love to see what you come up with, so please share them in the comments below.
