There has been a lot of talk about the DiggBar and its handling of URLs this week, after the company implemented some changes in its service. To clear the air, Digg has addressed the situation.
Digg CEO Jay Adelson issued the following statement on Digg the Blog:
I wanted to clear up some confusion created over the past couple of days surrounding the DiggBar, specifically how Digg short URLs work. As we’ve stated in the past, the DiggBar is meant to streamline the Digg experience and provide our registered users with the opportunity to catch up on comments, related stories and additional source content. Our strategy with Digg short URLs is to facilitate sharing of Digg content, not to be a conventional redirection service.
Last week, we made a change that began directing non-logged in traffic generated from Digg short URLs to Digg story pages where they can view the comments and related content. In response to feedback, all short URLs that were generated *before* today will now behave as they did prior to last week’s change by taking the user directly to the source content. Logged-in Digg users will continue to be directed to the source content with the DiggBar (if they have it turned on). Of course, if the content has never been submitted to Digg, viewers will continue to be sent directly to the source.
The DiggBar seems to have invoked nothing but controversy ever since it was launched. Digg seems to only want to use it to help promote its content, but the problem that people have had with this is that Digg’s content is not really Digg’s content. The content that appears on Digg of course comes from other sources, and when traffic becomes an issue, you’re going to have some angry publishers.
Digg continues to encourage feedback about the product, and seemingly wishes to stay on everybody’s good side, but clearly wants some traffic of its own out of the DiggBar. What do you think of how they’re handling it?
