Update: Kevin Rose is now saying that his WeFollow Twitter directory will now be “more closely linked” with Digg as they “experiment with user influence as it applies to the Twitter universe.” In a company blog post, he writes:
Over the last four years we’ve been continually evolving our (real-time) user influence calculations at Digg. Behind the scenes we track the types of stories you Digg, when you dugg something pre or post homepage promotion, and how your Digg influences others on the site. While not outwardly visible, many of these factors help us gauge when to put stories on the homepage or recommend them to others.
So what changes on Digg? Well, this won’t impact anything on Digg today, but user influence and the data we collect during this process will play an important role in upcoming versions of Digg.
Original Article 05/18: Digg Founder Kevin Rose says that there are some big changes coming to Digg this year. In an interview from April with Mike Arrington, Rose calls the changes “a ballsy move,” but does not give too much away.
“I will say this,” he says. “I don’t want to get into specific details about the product, but I believe that it’s time for Digg to get a little bit more real-time in nature. And we need to be a living and breathing site. And you know, that’s an exciting direction for us. I think that’s part of the reason why we rolled out a pretty awesome search. It was kind of us experimenting with some of that.”
Rose says that there will be a logo change, and that the site itself will be getting a revamp. I take this to mean that the whole thing will be getting a redesign.
Digg better hope that this goes over well with users, because they have probably seen enough controversy this year after the launch of the DiggBar. This riled up webmasters and the SEO community when it replaced URLs with Digg URLs, though the company eventually made some adjustments to appease them.
With regards to an upcoming real-time version of Digg, Arrington calls “real time” secret code for Twitter. This shouldn’t really come as much of a surprise to anyone. This is certainly the trend that social media as a whole seems to be gravitating towards.
