Today Digg and Facebook are getting close. Real close. Digg is unleashing its new social reader on Facebook. When users turn on social sharing from their Digg accounts, all the stories they read will be frictionlessly shared to their news feed, Timeline and their friends’ news tickers.
This new feature smooshes together your Facebook social graph and your Digg social graph, two social sets that might not really have much in common. This is yet another attempt at making Digg more social, following on the heels of Digg’s real-time newswire and social newsrooms, which function like topical channels curated by users. Will this new feature help Digg get back into social news?
Like other Facebook social news apps users will have control over what they share. They can turn social sharing off completely or select which audiences to share to and go back later to edit their activity. There’s also the backend route on Timeline, which requires editing behind the scenes on the Facebook Activity Log.
Digg decided to launch this new feature after it found that fans of the Digg Facebook page were visiting top Digg stories more regularly than its actual users. In fact, Digg tells us that logged-in Facebook users spent more time on the site – an average of 15 minutes vs. 10 minutes for the average user.
After users turn social sharing on from the Digg side (see above), all stories that a user reads on Digg will appear in the Facebook news ticker and news feed.
The Digg Social Reader on Facebook will roll out slowly.
After its re-design, the departure of founding CEO Kevin Rose and the eulogy that many have already written for it, this seems like a feeble attempt at getting back in. It seems like Digg is handing over what was once its prize – power users and control of social news – to Facebook.
