You may or may not have just watched the video tour of the new Digg. If you were watching carefully, it’s likely you probably spotted a number of similarities to the much beloved Twitter. In fact, the more you watch the more recognisable the new Digg becomes as a completely new news oritentated take on twitter.
From the moment you login to the new Digg you’re taken through the “on boarding” process you’re given the opportunity to “follow” your friends, publishers and taste makers they care about. Ok, that happens on a lot of sites but this is Digg, you can “follow” now, check out the figures under the names of the accounts (identical to the accounts on twitter) and of course the design of those new follow buttons.
Then a quick glance at the top bar of the new Digg, what’s given priority? Not Friends or Fans like the current Digg, but your twitter follower/following numbers.
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Then there’s the Digging process. We’re pretty sure, actually very sure, that the moment you tweet a link to a page it counts as Digg – assuming of course that you have a twitter account linked up to the new Digg.
On the new Digg, personalisation is paramount and it is the “My News” homepage that highlights this most by showing all the news that should be important to you. The news on the “My Latest News” section of My News is a collection of the stories the accounts your following are digging (or tweeting of course).
If this all sounds familiar, it should, Tweetmeme has been doing this for some time. What makes this different of course is the massive community that forms Digg while Tweetmeme is slightly limited in functionality and doesn’t have that community.
So where’s Facebook in all this? From the looks of things, nowhere. In a recent Diggnation-episode Kevin implied he wasn’t overly keen on Facebook’s web-wide splattering of like-buttons, probably because it competes head on with Digg’s ‘digg’ button. Is it possible there’s no Facebook integration and that Digg is completely convinced that twitter is the future of news?
Lets not forget Kevin Rose also co-founded WeFollow, a twitter directory which hasn’t really seen too much activity of late. Are we going to see Digg integrate WeFollow on some level? The company now officially owns the site, at least according to the sites footer.
The important thing to note is that this is all speculation and based entirely off the screenshots and video we’ve seen. Irrespective, there’s undoubtedly a deep integration with twitter and it’s a bold move from Rose. As long as twitter continues to growth and its current rate, it might just be his best move yet.
H/T to Marc Köhlbrugge for the trigger!
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