Digg.com Rebuilt and Launched in Six Weeks
Today Betaworks re-launched Digg.com after only six weeks of development, even though they completely rebuilt the site. Is it any good? Were six weeks enough or should they have taken more time to add those features missing today?
If you have been around the web for longer than a few years, you might have seen the rise and the fall of Digg.com as a site to share and rank links to webpages you're interested in. Back in 2009 it was still considered a decent link sharing platform and it worked well in getting traffic to your own web content. After an upgrade in 2010 Digg.com started losing traffic.
It was only two weeks ago that Digg.com was sold to Betaworks, who also own news.me. It turns out that this deal was already close around six weeks ago as it was then that Betaworks started to completely rebuild the Digg.com platform.
In general, the decision for completely rebuilding a platform that had its roots date as far back as 2004 is considered a sound one. The question remains, is six weeks long enough to completely rethink a public online platform? Shortcuts taken include, no comments section, Facebook authentication only and no integration with LinkedIn.
A bigger issue when using the new Digg.com bight be that it's not customizable or searchable at all. It would be useful to be able to at least specify what a link is about to reach a public that is interested in what I post. Right now it feels like submitted links simply get lost in the crowd.
One could argue that they should have taken more time and made sure more 'basic' features were available at launch. Or you could argue that it is not only brave to launch with only the most essential of features, but also very clever as now they can get a whole bunch of feedback and include their users in the process of iterating features on Digg.com.
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