For a few months now, Digg has been beta testing a radically new version of its popular social news aggregation site. Those lucky enough to secure an invitation have been experimenting with Digg’s new social focused “My News” section which provides curated news feeds based on the activity of your friends and the people you choose to follow. Today, Digg has flipped the switch and launched version 4 to the public, but it hasn’t been a smooth transition.
Apparently Digg itself is suffering from a bit of the Digg effect. Upon announcing the new launch and turning on the servers, Digg went down quite swiftly. The official Digg twitter account responded to the outage, thanking people “for all your interest in the new Digg,” adding that they were in the process of adding more capacity.
Given all the traffic Digg sees on a daily basis, it seems unlikely that a sudden glut of visitors could bring the site down. What’s more likely, is that pushing the new Digg has resulted in some temporary slowness. But hey, server speed, schmerver speed – here’s a reminder of the new features now available on Digg.
My News – If you visit the page while logged in to your Digg account, your new homepage is now “My News” where stories your friends have commented, dugg, and shared are aggregated. Digg now makes it very easy to find and follow your friends or your favorite outlets and personalities by pulling contacts from Facebook, Twitter and the like.
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– Digg has simplified the submission process on the homepage and has also made it possible to import RSS feeds directly into your account. This could be very powerful for publishers who want to quickly get their content out on the site automatically without the hassle of actually visiting the site.
Some have criticized Digg’s more social and publisher-friendly approach, but I for one think it’s a wise move. The social side of things makes finding relevant stories much easier and actually encourages interaction with the site through digging and commenting. I know now that my friends are more likely to see a story if I digg it or comment, so I’m incentivized to actually do those things.
It will be interesting to see how the rest of the Digg population reacts to the new changes once the site is actually speedy enough to be used again. (UPDATE: It is.) Just as with any site, there are bound to be many who are enraged about the new layout, but I think Digg 4 is going to win over more than it turns off in the end.
Are you fan of the changes? Go check out the new Digg and let us know what you think in the comments below!
