Digg Blog

We're Still Learning

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 12:28:00 -0400

Two weeks ago, we sent out a second survey to the over 18,000 people who signed up to help us work on our reader. In our first survey, we focused on core discovery and reading features. This time around we wanted to learn about the more ancillary features like read later and sharing. Here’s what we learned from over 8,600 responses:

Email Still Dominates Sharing

While about 55% of users share news via Facebook or Twitter, over 75% share news via email. It almost goes without saying that our reader will include seamless sharing to all these services.

How People Read Things Later

Though over 1/3 of respondents don’t use a “read it later” service, Pocket, Instapaper, Evernote and Readability are all popular options. Don’t worry! Our goal is to support all of them.

Social Features Aren’t A Top Priority

Nearly half of all respondents said that they never used Google Reader’s social features (before they were rolled back in 2011), while just 17% said that they used them often. Though we may not have a robust social functionality in place for launch, ultimately we believe that social features which foster connections between readers will be an important part of the Digg experience.

People Will Pay

Free products on the Internet don’t have a great track record. They tend to disappear, leaving users in a lurch. We need to build a product that people can rely on and trust will always be there for them. We’re not sure how pricing might work, but we do know that we’d like our users to be our customers, not our product. So when we asked survey participants whether or not they would be willing to pay, we were pleased to see that over 40% said yes.

Our beta release in June will be just the beginning, a product built with experimentation in mind by a team eager to work with you to build something you love.

As always, if you’re willing to lend a hand, including participating in surveys like this, please sign up at digg.com/reader!

What you told us

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 11:43:00 -0400

Last week we sent out a survey to the over 17,000 people who signed up to help us work on our reader. Amazingly, we’ve gotten more than 8,000 responses so far, and they keep trickling in. Here’s what we’ve learned:

Users read a lot, a lot of the time

80%(!) of respondents check Google Reader many times a day. And 40% of users follow more than 100 feeds. There is no doubt about it — this is a product for power users, and we’ll need to make sure we have some serious infrastructure in place to support that kind of usage for launch.

Google Reader isn’t for work, and it isn’t for play – it’s for both

Over 75% of respondents indicated that they use Google Reader for both work and play. This type of dual usage is an impressive testament to the product’s flexibility.

People are eager to try and find a product that can replace Reader

The survey suggests that people are trying a lot of different types of RSS products, but have yet to settle on one or another en masse.

Don’t give short shrift to shortcuts

67% reported that they use keyboard shortcuts at least some of the time. Don’t worry, this one’s definitely on the list.

Search is more of a hobby

This was an interesting data point. While 25% reported never using search, over just over half said that they sometimes do. Search is a huge investment in terms of development time and infrastructure costs. We don’t yet know if we’ll have the necessary infrastructure up and running in time for our initial beta launch, but it’s definitely on the roadmap.

If there’s one thing you could remove from Google Reader what would it be?

At the end of the survey, we asked a few open ended questions. Thousands of responses were left, and we looked through every single one. Mike made a word cloud of a few of the response sets.

We have a ton of work to do in the next few months, and we need your help. If you’re willing to lend a hand, including participating in surveys like this, please sign up at digg.com/reader!

Digg

What’s Next

Mon, 25 Mar 2013 10:28:36 -0400

A few days ago we announced that we were re-prioritizing our product roadmap for 2013 in order to build an RSS reader from scratch. While we had long planned to build something like this, we had no idea we’d be attempting to do it so soon, or within such a tight timeframe. But after Google’s announcement last week, and Reader’s imminent shutdown, we think it’s the right thing to do. It’s certainly the self-interested thing to do, given how much we all relied on Google Reader.

Over 800 comments were left on last week’s blog post. That’s more than we received when we told the world we were rebuilding Digg itself. It’s also proof that Google Reader users (and RSS devotees in general) are rabid information addicts with strong opinions. We’re truly grateful for the input.

The comments are rife with practical, creative, and smart insights that we will do our level best not to squander. Over the next few months, our goal is to spend as much time as possible with devoted users of Google Reader and other reading applications.

After combing through all 800 comments, here are 4 points that seemed to recur, and loudly:

Keep it simple, stupid*
Make it fast (like, really fast)
Synchronize across devices
Make it easy to import from existing Google Reader accounts

Google did a lot of things right with its Reader, but based on what we’re hearing from users, there is room for meaningful improvement. We want to build a product that’s clean and flexible, that bends easily and intuitively to the needs of different users. We want to experiment with and add value to the sources of information that are increasingly important, but difficult to surface and organize in most reader applications — like Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Reddit, LinkedIn, or Hacker News. We likely won’t get everything we want into v1, but we believe it’s worth exploring.

We’re a small team, and while we tend to work best under tight time constraints, building a Google Reader replacement in a few months is a massive undertaking that will consume our days and nights. We’re confident we can ship a product that meets the principles above, but if a feature is missing on Day 1 that you were really looking forward to, we ask that you 1) tell us and 2) be patient.

With that in mind, we’re going to continue to gather input from Reader junkies, casual users, and even the original developers themselves. If you’re at all interested in being a part of the development process (or just keeping up with our progress), please join our email list. We’ll use that list to keep in touch with you and the thousands of others who have already signed up.

Digg

P.S. We’re also eager to work with any developers that want to lend a hand, so get in touch if you’re interested in being a part of this (mildly insane) sprint.

We're Building A Reader

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 14:25:48 -0400

Like many of you, we were dismayed to learn that Google will be shutting down its much-loved, if under-appreciated, Google Reader on July 1st. Through its many incarnations, Google Reader has remained a solid and reliable tool for those who want to ensure they are getting the best from their favorite sections of the Internet. And though they were not wholly appreciated at the time, Reader’s early social features were forward-thinking and hugely useful.

We’ve heard people say that RSS is a thing of the past, and perhaps in its current incarnation it is, but as daily (hourly) users of Google Reader, we’re convinced that it’s a product worth saving. So we’re going to give it our best shot. We’ve been planning to build a reader in the second half of 2013, one that, like Digg, makes the Internet a more approachable and digestible place. After Google’s announcement, we’re moving the project to the top of our priority list. We’re going to build a reader, starting today.

Since 2010, when we started working on News.me at betaworks, we’ve been obsessed with building tools that surface the most interesting things on the Internet, in real-time. That’s what has guided our approach to rebuilding Digg, and it’s with that experience behind us (including a whole load of mistakes), that we will build the new reader.

We hope to identify and rebuild the best of Google Reader’s features (including its API), but also advance them to fit the Internet of 2013, where networks and communities like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Reddit and Hacker News offer powerful but often overwhelming signals as to what’s interesting. Don’t get us wrong: we don’t expect this to be a trivial undertaking. But we’re confident we can cook up a worthy successor.

In order to pull this off in such a small window, we’re going to need your help. We need your input on what you want to see in a reader. What problems should it solve for you? What’s useful? What isn’t? What do you wish it could do that it can’t today?

If you want to pitch in your thoughts – or just want to notified when it’s ready – please click here. If you have zero interest in any of this, don’t worry, the Digg you know and love isn’t going away.

Andrew

PS - If you love making beautiful things and want to help us build the new reader, please let us know!

Thinking About Monetization

Thu, 10 Jan 2013 08:13:00 -0500

We’re proud of what the new Digg team has accomplished since we took over the site in August. We released an iPhone app, an iPad app (both featured by Apple), an email product called The Daily Digg, and a site redesign. We doubled our users, publishers are starting to notice “the Digg effect” once again, and most importantly, users think we’re on the right track. As we look forward to 2013, we wanted to take a moment and talk a little bit about our approach to monetization.

Our mission at Digg is to build the best discovery application on the web, and — critically — to build it in such a way that it can last. We don’t want to build a product, we want to build a sustainable product — one that lasts a long time and ultimately touches hundreds of millions of people. Today, our product is about 1% done, but waiting to experiment with monetization models until the product has reached some notion of maturity would be a mistake. In reality, our product will never be “finished,” and designing the business separate from the product would result in a disconnected experience that does a disservice to both.

If you spend enough time with John Borthwick, you’ll probably hear him talk about how a business should “align to the grain of the product.” In other words, proper execution of the business model should at worst have a negligible impact on the product, and at best have a positive impact on the product. Look around at the products you use everyday, and you’ll begin to see that this is a relatively high bar. For Digg, it will take time and energy (and a few mistakes) to find the model that meets this standard, but nothing is more critical to our long term success.

We’re taking the same approach to our business as we do to the product: try things, talk to users, adapt. A few months ago we started experimenting with a program called Apps We Like. The idea is simple: across mobile, desktop and web, there are lots of great developers building great apps, but most people only ever see a tiny fraction of them — typically, what happens to appear at the top of the App Store or on TechCrunch. And as developers, we know how hard it is to get the word out to relevant people in a predictable way.

So here’s how it works: each week we select an app to feature on the Digg homepage, and we label it with “Apps We Like.”

Since we can’t promote every great app, we also make it possible for developers to apply for promotion. Our evaluation process is pretty simple: is this an app that we think our users should know about? If accepted, developers pay for the promotion. If the promotion was paid for, you’ll see that it is clearly marked “Sponsored.”

Developer and user feedback has been positive so far. We’re not sure how big Apps We Like can be, but we think our users will like it, and so we’re giving it a shot.

If you’re a developer and you have a great app that our users should know about, you can apply here: Apply for Apps We Like

We’ll take this approach to each business opportunity — looking first to the value that it provides our users. We are challenging ourselves to think beyond traditional display advertising. Users don’t like it and we’re hearing more and more that advertisers don’t either. We have a lot to learn, so we’re starting early. We’re going to try some things, learn some things, and make some mistakes. Fulfilling our vision for Digg means not only building a great product, but building one that can last.

Jake + Mike

p.s. if you’re following along on Tumblr, you should check out the new Digg Tumblr account. It’s like digg.com on steroids.

100 days with the new digg

Thu, 06 Dec 2012 09:30:00 -0500

It has now been over 100 days since we launched the new Digg. In the last couple of months, we launched an iPad app, redesigned the iPhone app, nearly doubled the number of stories on the homepage, and upgraded many of the features we had to skimp on during the six week sprint (Twitter login, for example). We doubled our monthly active users from June (the last full month of Old Digg) to October, and people are starting to notice.

We’ve also been busy building out a great team. We recently hired a full time community manager — Veronica de Souza, of Binders Full of Women fame, and our second front end engineer — Kevin Barnett, who comes from New York Magazine. The team remains small, and we remain convinced that we can do a lot of good with a small team.

Right before we launched we conducted a survey that we hoped would help us better understand the Digg community and experience. You might recall this stark statistic: only 8% of Digg users would recommend Digg to a friend.

Though an unnerving proposition, moving the “would you recommend” number became a singular goal on which the team could focus all of our attention.

So how are we tracking against our goal?

I’m happy to report that, based on the data from our most recent survey, 81% of survey respondents said that they would recommend Digg to a friend — a 10x improvement.

So what else did we learn? The majority of our users are 18-29 years old, with the vast majority between 18 and 39.

We also asked our users how they typically get their news. When we asked this question in July, Digg was at the bottom of the list. Today, Digg has taken the #1 position, followed closely by Major Online Newspapers, TV, then Reddit, Hacker News and other community based news applications. Surprisingly, Facebook and Twitter are smack in the middle.

Here’s a breakdown of subjects that the Digg community finds interesting:

With over 2,600 responses, there was a lot of data to wade through, but overall, what we heard from the survey was this: we’re off to a fine start, but we have a lot of work to do. Social features, more content on the site — this is what keeps us up at night. It will be a lot of work, and require a lot of patience, but we’re confident that we can get it done — and do it right. Stay tuned…

Jake + Team Digg

Digg for iPad + Reading Sync

Fri, 28 Sep 2012 20:01:00 -0400

We’re happy to report that Digg for iPad, and an update to Digg for iPhone 5 is now live in the app store!

Free Download — go get it!

When we relaunched Digg last month, we said that we wanted to build an experience that is native to each device. The tablet is quickly becoming an important device for Digg users, and the iPad is leading the way, at nearly 30% of mobile visits to digg.com.

In this version is a new feature we call Reading Sync. For users with both iPhone and iPad, Reading Sync allows you to start reading on one device, and continue where you left off on another. Kudos to Mr. Rob for coming up with this awesome implementation.

Besides Reading Sync, Digg for iOS includes a handful of other great features:

“Paperboy” automatically downloads the latest Digg stories whenever you leave home or work
Save articles to your Reading List from digg.com, Digg for iPad, or Digg for iPhone
Digg your favorite stories and share to Facebook, Twitter, by email or text

Hard to believe that launch was only seven weeks ago (p.s. we’re hiring awesome developers)!

Digg for iPad

Digg for iPhone

The Digg Archive

Thu, 30 Aug 2012 16:35:00 -0400

Today we launched the Digg Archive, a tool to help users of the old Digg (before July 2012) retrieve a history of their Diggs, Submissions, Saved Articles, and Comments.

We believe that people own the data they create, so while we work to determine if and how this data makes its way into the new Digg, we wanted to provide a way for users to access their history. It took some digging through the old infrastructure, but the complete Digg Archive is now live.

Get your Digg archive

Our friends at Kippt and Pinboard have made it super simple to transfer your data into their services. Visit Kippt.com/digg to get started, or follow the instructions at the link above to import your data into Pinboard.

As always, you can reach us at support@digg.com with any questions.

Jake

p.s. You can also download your data in json or csv format. If you’re a developer interested in working on the Digg Archive data set, get in touch.

Get your Digg Reading List on your iPhone and on the web

Tue, 28 Aug 2012 12:25:00 -0400

We rolled out a cool new feature this morning. Find a story on Digg that looks awesome but don’t have time to read it? Click “Save” under any story to save it to your Reading List on Digg.com and to the Digg iPhone app.

To save a story to your Digg Reading List, click the “Save” link:

The story will appear in your Reading List on Digg:

…and on your iPhone:

Take a look and let us know what you think!

new features this week

Wed, 08 Aug 2012 14:58:00 -0400

It’s been a fun and crazy seven days since launch. Here’s a quick summary of our progress to date and plans for this week.

By the end of the week, Digg users will be able to:

Sign up and sign in with a Twitter account
Choose whether or not their diggs are shared to Facebook Timeline
Retweet, Reply to, or Favorite tweets displayed on the Digg homepage

In addition, a new version of the iPhone app is under review by Apple. More features on the way, but we wanted to clue you all in on these important changes.

For you data nerds out there…

Digg is averaging over 125,000 daily active users across web and iPhone
Over 1 million people have checked out the new Digg since launch (whoa)
Digg users visit ~1.4 times per day on the web, and ~2.3 times per day on the iPhone
At any given moment, about 75% of the users on Digg.com are repeat visitors

Jake

v1 by the numbers

Fri, 03 Aug 2012 13:36:00 -0400

Coming up for air to provide a quick update on the new Digg.

Some exciting stats since Tuesday’s launch:

By Wednesday afternoon, over half a million people had checked out the new Digg
17% of visits to the web came from mobile devices
We’ve seen over 50,000 story submissions, with about 100 stories making their way to the homepage
We’re sending about 200 visitors per minute to great stories that make it to our Top section, from sites like Foodbeast, The Atlantic Wire and Nowness

New features and feature fixes are on the way. We just submitted a new version of the Digg iPhone app to Apple, which will include a handful of additions like Digg’s Popular stories, and the ability to save stories to your Reading List (or to Pocket or Instapaper) without having to log in with Facebook.

If you haven’t yet, check out our shiny new iPhone app.

We have a lot of work to do, so thanks for your patience. Stay tuned.

Jake

Welcome to Digg v1

Tue, 31 Jul 2012 18:56:00 -0400

On July 20, we announced that we were turning Digg back into a startup and rebuilding it from scratch in six weeks. After an intense month and a half, we managed to get the new Digg up and running on a fresh code base and infrastructure. We now have a solid foundation on which to build, and we expect to build fast. Yesterday, we previewed the new Digg applications for web, iPhone, and mobile web and today we’re happy to share Digg v1.

While today’s launch is a milestone for us, we’re more excited about what’s coming next. In the subsequent weeks and months we will:

introduce network-based personalization features (like we do in News.me) to make Digg a more relevant and social experience
experiment with new commenting features
continue to iterate Digg for mobile web
move the website forward with features like the Reading List, different views into the top stories on Digg, and more data to help users better understand why a particular story is trending
launch an API so that members of the development community can build all the products that we haven’t even thought of yet

For anyone who may have questions about what’s going on and where we plan to head, we’ve put together an FAQ. We’d appreciate any feedback.

We’re proud of what we’ve built over the last month and a half, but today is just the beginning. Hello world, welcome to v1.

v1 preview

Mon, 30 Jul 2012 11:13:00 -0400

Digg v1 will launch this week after a six-week sprint to rebuild the site from scratch. Here’s a first glimpse.

We want the new Digg to deliver the best of what the Internet is talking about right now. It must be alive and responsive to its participants. When we asked people in the v1 survey why they visit Digg, the overwhelming answer was to find, read and share great stories. This mapped well to our four goals:

We make it easy to find, read, and share the most interesting and talked about stories on the Internet right now.
The experience must be fast and thin. Let users go, and they will come back to you. We optimize for return visits, not pageviews per visit.
Build an experience that is native to each device: smart phone, inbox, Web page. Stories must find the user, wherever they are.
Users must be able to share where they and their friends already are — on networks like Facebook, Twitter and email.

v1 Design
It seems to us that what the Internet is talking about is too rich to be properly represented by a list of headlines. Some stories are bigger and have more impact than others; some stories are actually components of larger ones. Some stories can be told with text; others are best told through images. So when we set about to rethink Digg we started with design.

These are some of the earliest mock-ups for the new Digg (and by earliest, we mean a few weeks old):

Here’s a closer look of the wireframes we started with. In fact, this is the mockup we used in our proposal to the Digg Board in advance of the acquisition:

The final version is close to complete, and when you visit Digg.com later this week, you’ll find a beautiful, image-friendly, and ad-free experience. We don’t think of Digg.com as a traditional destination because the website is only one piece of the overall Digg experience and because we aren’t interested in capturing pageviews. So above all v1 will be about simplicity. We are doing away with “Newsrooms,” we are killing the “Newsbar” (aka “Diggbar”), and we are reverting “Newswire” back to its original name, Upcoming. Digg v1 pivots around three views: Top Stories, Popular and Upcoming.

At launch, v1 will not include a commenting system. When Digg was founded in 2004, it was one of the only places on the web to have a conversation with like-minded people. Today, conversations happen everywhere, and the problem that Digg started to solve in 2004 now has no shortage of solutions. We knew that if we were going to support commenting at launch, we had to do it right, and we knew that we couldn’t do it right in six weeks. In the coming weeks we will conduct a few experiments in commenting that will inform more permanent features.

v1 Digg score
The early Digg was brilliant and honest and democratic. Each digg was a vote and each vote counted towards the ultimate objective: moving a story closer and closer to the top position on the Digg homepage. Every vote was a statement: “more people should see this story.”

Today, we vote on Facebook with every share and on Twitter with every tweet, and conversations take place across loads of different sites, apps, and networks. So how do we surface “what the Internet is talking about,” when the Internet is talking beyond the walls of Digg.com? We tear down the walls. When we launch v1, users will continue to be able to digg stories, but Digg scores will also take into account Facebook shares and tweets. Roll over any Digg score to see the breakdown. We’re excited to see how this new data can help us identify the best stories on the web.

Here’s an early wireframe of the new Digg score:

v1 Moderators
How do we weigh the importance of all of these signals from around the web and manage the new design? That’s where our humans come in — Dave, Josh, and Ross. We learned, while building News.me at betaworks, that finding really great stories requires a mix of smart algorithms, smart networks and, not least, smart people to parse the two. Digg is what the Internet is talking about right now, so our team will be watching diggs, Facebook shares, tweets, and a handful of other data to determine where a story should sit on the homepage. Facebook shares and tweets are important signals and will be closely monitored, but we care first and foremost about what Digg users have to say — measured, as always, in diggs.

v1 Mobile
Our experience at News.me and the results of the v1 survey speak loud and clear: getting mobile right is critical. Fifty-six percent of the v1 survey respondents reported reading the news on their phones multiples times per day. So this week alongside a new Digg.com we’re launching a brand new Digg for iPhone, built from scratch. We’re also launching a mobile-optimized version of Digg.com to work on any phone or tablet.

What’s next
Priority 1, 2 and 3 for the last six weeks has been to rebuild v1 — to lay a strong foundation for a new Digg, starting with a beautiful and simple experience on web, iPhone and email. After this week’s launch, we’ll be back with more details around our roadmap.

As we mentioned in our first blog post, we hope that you’ll see these features as our v1, and August 1 as the first of many iterations on a new Digg.

John, Jake, Mike, Justin and the new Digg team

v1 survey results

Tue, 24 Jul 2012 11:24:00 -0400

We have been blown away by the response to the survey we put out on Friday. As of today, 3,754 people have responded. First and foremost, we learned that no one is happy with the current state of Digg. 92% of survey respondents said that they would not recommend the current Digg to a friend. This level of dissatisfaction does not call for incremental improvements. It does not call for an evolution of Digg. The problem we are trying to solve with v1 — how can we deliver the best of what the Internet is talking about right now? — calls for something else. V1 shouldn’t be a better Digg, it shouldn’t be a better Reddit, and it shouldn’t be a better Hacker News. It has to be different.

Here’s how survey respondents said they get their news:

The data shows that how people find news is fragmented and complex. The vast majority of respondents reported getting their news in four or more different ways. The Internet is full of great stories and communities, but it lacks a simple product to help people find the best of those stories and to make sense of them outside of the communities from which they originate.

Mobile needs to be way more than an afterthought
Check out this data: 56% of survey respondents say they read news multiple times per day on their phones. When Digg launched in 2004 that number was probably close to zero.

We saw with News.me that more and more people are getting the news on phones and tablet devices. Great news stories are everywhere — in pockets, on couches, and on desks — and great news products need to be everywhere too.

What else do you want the new Digg team to know?
Here are some of my favorites:

Survey Response #2 — “do what your name says: RETHINK digg. scrap old features even if they were/are still popular. times are changing.”

Survey Response #35 — “My ideal new digg would be evening-edition.com or Business Insider’s 10 Things You Need To Know this morning, with digg’s social curation as the backend.”

Survey Response #37 — “I visited Digg (at least) daily around 2005–2008. I would very much love to see a true re-imagining of what Digg could be in 2013+, but it has a long way to go. Oh, and just in case you’re not focusing primarily on mobile, you’re wasting your time.”

Survey Response #129 — “The only way Digg will succeed is if it becomes the leader in something. It’s time to stop following every other social media companies feature set and start leading on something.”

Survey Response #161 — “don’t just try to rip-off reddit, you’re going to have to come up with something fresh.”

Survey Response #1032 — “Make something awesome. The internet is rooting for you.”

Thanks, Internet. We’ll be back soon with more details.

Jake

v1

Fri, 20 Jul 2012 12:36:00 -0400

As betaworks and Digg both announced on their blogs, we are taking over Digg and turning it back into a startup. What they didn’t mention is that we’re rebuilding it from scratch. In six weeks.

On August 1, after an adrenaline and caffeine-fueled six weeks, we’re rolling out a new v1. 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.

Huh… who is “we”?
We’re a New York-based team of 10 engineers, designers, and editors. As a startup called News.me, we have been eating, drinking and dreaming news applications for the last couple of years, designing products for email, iPad and iPhone that help people find and read the stories shared by their friends on Twitter and Facebook.

These principles are posted in our office, which is affectionately dubbed “The War Room”:

We make it easy to find, read, and share the most interesting and talked about stories on the Internet.
The experience must be fast and thin. Let users go, and they will come back to you. We optimize for return visits, not pageviews per visit.
Build an experience that is native to each device: smart phone, inbox, Web page. Stories must find the user, wherever they are.
Users must be able to share where they and their friends already are — on networks like Facebook, Twitter and email.

We are a startup team with ambitious principles and we need to move quickly. 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.

Why did you acquire Digg?
When it launched in 2004, Digg was way ahead of its time. It illustrated a fact that, since then, Facebook and Twitter have driven home: that readers of news no longer just read, they participate; they no longer just consume, they create; that the traditional roles of the editor can be dispersed and democratized. Digg was new and it was different, and it was like nothing that had come before.

Here’s what some smart people have had to say about Digg in recent years:

“Digg has always represented the spirit of the early Web 2.0 movement to me. Facebook has never been the emblematic company of the Web’s mid-2000 resurgence, because it has always been such an outlier from the pack. But Digg – like Delicious, Six Apart, Flickr, YouTube and others – was one of those messy, risky companies founded at a time when no one was ready to believe in the Web again.”
— Sarah Lacy, TechCrunch (now at PandoDaily)

“Digg was a pioneer that changed the media landscape not by creating anything, but instead by putting the people in charge of what was media. Like Flickr, it was a company that opened our eyes to the potential of the social web. It also reminded us that links are and will always be the atomic unit of the web…”
— Om Malik, GigaOm

We acquired Digg because we all need a product to help find, read and understand what the Internet is talking about right now.

Why do you care? Why should I care?
We care because Digg represented the messiness of the Internet at its best. 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. 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.

Why is News.me the best team to do Digg’s rebuild?
We’ve spent the last few years building news applications, and diving deep into how and why people find, read, and talk about the news. And we’ve learned a lot.

We’ve learned that we need to approach the problem with fresh eyes. The reason we started with email, iPad, and iPhone applications was precisely because they constrained our design and forced us to challenge old assumptions.

We’ve learned that, at its best, content is a dynamic blend of smart algorithms, smart networks, and smart people.

We’ve learned that reading the news — from the breakfast table and the water cooler to the coffee shop — is nothing if not a social experience. The news influences how we interact with those around us; it shapes how we understand ourselves and our world.

We’ve also learned that we care about the same things that Digg has always cared about — delivering the most interesting and talked about stories on the Internet. We have a lot to learn from Digg and the community behind it, and a lot of experimenting to do, and we’re chomping at the bit to get started.

Is the new Digg going to be a reskinned News.me?
Nope. We want to take what we’ve learned at News.me — delivering a personalized experience based on what your friends are sharing — and bring it to Digg. This will take some time, and we will want your input as we bring the best of these two products together.

How will Digg make money?
We won’t. Not yet. We have little time and fewer resources to focus on anything but the user, who is our first, second and third priority. We believe we can accomplish with ten great engineers and designers what other companies do with one hundred good ones and, by keeping our costs low, take our time to find a business model that does not disrupt or detract from the user experience.

What will happen to News.me?
News.me will continue to be available, and you can expect similar personalization from Digg in the next few months, but we will ultimately roll them into one product, under the Digg brand. That said, we won’t take anything away from the News.me experience until we can replace it with something better at Digg.

What if I don’t digg the Digg you launch on August 1?
We hope that you will see the upcoming launch as the beginning, not the end. This is the beginning of a new generation for Digg — a restoration of what was brilliant and disruptive and a reinvention of what was not.

What if I have criticism or suggestions for you?
Let us know! We want to hear from you: What did you love about Digg? What did you not love about Digg? What did it represent to you? Why did it matter? Let us know in our very first user survey…

…but we also ask for your patience: Building applications that can scale to millions of users takes a gargantuan effort, so we have to focus on only the most important features for launch. If we’re missing something on Day 1, hang in there and let us know about it. There will be a Day 10 and a Day 20 and a Day 100. Help us rebuild Digg.

Follow along @Digg and on Facebook. We’ll be back with more in the next few days.

Jake, Mike, and Justin