Digg revives News.me as Digg Deeper, revealing the best links your friends are sharing on Twitter

Digg today announced Digg Deeper, a new feature that shows you what links your friends are sharing on social networks in real-time. You can get this list in three different places: on the Digg homepage, as real-time email alerts, and as mobile notifications from its iOS app (no news on the Android app).

Update on July 15: Digg has announced the service is now available for everyone.

For now, Digg Deeper will show content based on who you follow on Twitter: after you log in, it will comb through your timeline to isolate the links your friends are discussing the most. The company does plan, however, to add “other social sources” in a time period merely described “soon.”

Digg uses an algorithm that must first analyze your Twitter feed to determine the right threshold for your alerts. Making sure not to reveal exactly how it works, here’s one factor that it takes into account:

For example, one component of the algorithm measures the activity around every link in your feed. If you follow tons of accounts that are linking to many hundreds of stories a day, you might get an alert when 5 friends share the same link. But if you follow only a handful of accounts, you might get an alert when just 2 friends share that link.

While Digg was originally a social news website, driven by what its users vote up and down, it is now curated by editors that attempt to aggregate what is currently worth reading and watching on the Internet. Now the service wants to expand again to get “the best stories coming straight from the people and sources you trust most.”

If this sounds familiar, that’s because this feature was originally built a few years ago as part of News.me, a social news service built on top of Twitter and Facebook. The iOS apps were shut down back in October 2012 to focus on Digg, and so now we’ve come full circle.

Digg is sending out invitations for Digg Deeper to its News.me subscribers. The company wouldn’t say when exactly it will open the feature up to everyone; timing will depend on when “we feel like things are stable and we’ve worked out the bugs.”

Top Image Credit: LaughingSquid / Flickr