Usually sites these days are frequently adding new sharing features. Popular social site Digg is actually eliminating some.
Most notably, Digg has decided to remove its “shouts” feature, which allows you users to send “shouts” to their friends when they want them to Digg something. Digg’s Jen Burton explains:
As some of you know, shouts have been a controversial feature since their inception and considering the ever-changing landscape of the social web, we’ve elected to remove them in favor of more popular options. We’ve added easier access to sharing via email, Facebook and Twitter. As always, we want to encourage sharing and communication within our community and will continue to look into features that address these needs.
On the homepage you can now mouse over or click on the “share” link to open a dialog box that offers sharing via email, Facebook or Twitter. For example, if you click on the email icon, we’ll open a new mail message from your default email client and all you’ll need to do is enter email addresses. If you click on the Twitter icon, we’ll open Twitter in a browser window and populate the update field with the story title and URL (note that you’ll need to be logged in to Twitter at the time).
In addition to shouts, Digg has also removed its “blog this” feature, blaming low usage as the reason.
It is worth noting that Digg has added different ways to share content in recent memory, apart from those mentioned above. The site recently launched its long-awaited integration with Facebook Connect. The controversial DiggBar also has ways to easily share content via Facebook and Twitter.
