Home How Long Can Digg Rely Mainly on Facebook?

How Long Can Digg Rely Mainly on Facebook?

When Facebook launched frictionless sharing last year, users flipped out. These days, it seems like they’re starting to come around. At least, that’s what Digg would like us to believe.

Digg launched its very own social reader on Facebook in late December 2011. Now, 2 million impressions later, it’s adding new features that it believes Facebook-Diggers (or maybe it should be Digg-Facebookers?) will enjoy. This announcement comes on the same day as the Facebook open graph rollout, and ties into Facebook’s vision of a frictionless sharing future.

Users can add additional information to their Facebook Timeline and the news ticker, including specific stories they digg, comments they make and stories they’ve submitted. The social reader is more active than The Guardian or Washington Post, which just shows what the user read. This makes sense considering the active, community-focused nature of the original Digg site.

As with other frictionless sharing apps, the social reader doesn’t force everyone to share everything. Users publish on a per story basis, and can also choose what they share – submissions but not comments, diggs but not submissions, for example. The social reader gives users more control, with an ability to turn the social reader off from the Digg newsbar, or edit story activity to Timeline and the Activity Log after the fact. The reader makes a distinction between stories that readers digg versus stories that readers read.

But do any of these things matter? Digg is trying to regain the control it lost after Kevin Rose’s departure nearly one year ago. In October 2011, it added social newsrooms, re-inventing it as a real-time, game-driven news room. Gone are the days of simple up-voting and down-voting. The once most-popular online news site is still struggling to catch up. Will it?

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