Seen that rumored sale of Digg to The Washington Post today? What was your first feeling? Were you thinking ‘Oh wow, that is great news for Digg and its users’? Or did you think ‘Oh boy, that will be the end of Digg as we know it’.

If it is true that The Washington Post is only acquiring the team behind Digg and not the site and technology, then sure, that would mean the end of the service. But even if they buy the whole service and integrate it into the The Washington Post, I still wouldn’t feel confident about its future.

Remember when Flickr and Delicious went to Yahoo? How about TechCrunch to AOL? It isn’t too often that startups find a great new home, stay loyal to the community that made them, and flourish under the new owner. It is very rare indeed.

I sold two companies in the past, and during both negotiations we solemnly swore we wanted to grow the company and stay on as management. Yeah right. Within 6 to 12 months we got so fed up with not being in charge and trying to get anything done within the new corporate structure that we all left.

It felt like we screwed up at the time. But since then I’ve found out that it is just how it works. Founders and entrepreneurs aren’t managers. We can’t adjust to our new roles and pretty soon we’ll get frustrated and leave. Arrington? The Flickr founders? Nobody sticks around for long.

Which makes me wonder how I would deal with an acquisition. I think I would try my best to persuade my acquirers to not announce the sale. If possible. I would simply announce a partnership and keep everything running like it is. Use our different strengths to advance both business, without integrating anything. In a perfect world you wouldn’t know we’d been acquired.

Of course that would be nearly impossible. Companies have to announce that kind of stuff and managers need to brag about the acquisitions they did to move up in the world. No way they would be able to keep this silent. Still, wouldn’t it be better?

In conclusion; should we be acquired by Bloomberg, I wouldn’t announce it, and if you would ask, I would deny it. Not that we have been acquired, but you know what I mean…

With a history only fitting an Internet business, Digg has seen the highest of the highs and the lowest of the lows, and everywhere in between.

We’ve received a tips from multiple sources that Digg may have found a suitor by way of The Washington Post.

(Please see updates at the bottom of this post)

The social bookmarking site launched in 2004, the brainchild of Kevin Rose, who now works at Google. Digg, which many see as the site that spearheaded the “Web 2.0″ era has been a target by companies like Google in the past, but nothing has never come of those negotiations, with Google walking away in 2008.

If these rumors are true, it seems like Digg may have finally found its exit. It’s not known at this time what the final asking price will be, but Digg has raised 45M to date.

Digg’s current CEO Matt Williams took the reigns from Kevin Rose after Jay Adelson walked away from his post in 2010, but stayed on as an advisor.

During its heyday, Digg was known for pushing massive amounts of traffic that were dugg, or voted up, by the site’s community of users. Once a link was pushed to the homepage of the site, a massive windfall of new visitors were to be expected. This became so potent that many people tried to game Digg by creating groups of voters, and even trying to pay off its top users in return for a digg.

Lately, Digg hasn’t had quite the effect that it once had, even though it reported surging mobile traffic thanks to integration with Facebook’s Open Graph and Timeline.

This would be an interesting piece of the puzzle for The Washington Post, which recently hired slashdot’s founder Rob Malda to head up the WaPo Labs division. Perhaps teaming the site up with its own publication could breathe new life into the community. The Washington Post has been making a big push towards strengthening its social prowess, seeing big results with its Facebook social reader app.

Kevin Rose infamously introduced a great new site called Digg on a Screensavers TV segment called “slashdot killers”, without ever mentioning that he was behind it:

We reached out to the company and got the following response from their PR department:

Thanks for reaching out.
We don’t comment on rumor or speculation.

If you have any information on Digg and The Washington Post, please feel free to email me at drew @ thenextweb.com

UPDATE: The Washington Post has replied to us with the following:

We have no comment.

UPDATE 2: According to TechCrunch, The Washington Post is acquiring Digg staff only and not the site or its assets, and those may be still up for sale. This seems pretty odd, since that would mean that Digg would be, in effect, shut down.

UPDATE 3:

Peter Kafka of AllThingsD follows up with a report saying WaPo bought Digg’s technology team but not the business, and that current Digg management will need to figure out what to do with the site and other assets now. Good luck with that.

Digg might be seeing a nice burst of new traffic thanks to Facebook’s recent Timeline and Open Graph initiatives. In a post titled “How Facebook Changed our Mobile Traffic“, Digg’s team discussed how mobile traffic to the site has risen since it launched its Timeline app in December.

Depending on which source you trust Digg’s traffic has been extremely flat, if not dropping, over the past year, which included a few leadership changes such as its founder Kevin Rose leaving the company entirely.

Armed with a source of new traffic, mobile visitors from Facebook, the company is aiming to make some changes to its mobile site and iOS app due to the stats it found below:

- Unique visitors to m.digg.com are up 29 percent
- Mobile accounts for about 35 percent of our traffic from Digg Social Reader
- Of the people coming from Facebook to Digg, 27 percent are on a mobile device

What types of changes will the company make? Here are some of the things it plans to launch within the next week:

Knowing this, we’ve made a few changes to our mobile experience rolling out later this week. Firstly, if you’re currently using our Digg iOS app, we’ll ask if you want to upgrade to add reads, comments and Diggs to your Facebook Timeline, allowing you to easily sync your Digg activity between your desktop and IOS device.

Secondly, if you’re reading Digg.com on a mobile device, you can now use the new Mobile Newsbar, which is built especially for the mobile touch devices. For those of you unfamiliar with it, the Newsbar allows you to click through a number of related headlines quickly and directly from the browser; which we think is a better way to read content on-the-go.

Thanks to Facebook, Digg might be getting a bit of a second chance thanks to getting the front and center treatment on people’s profiles by way of Timeline. While a few months worth of data isn’t enough to show that Digg is out of the woods completely, the team seems to be pretty excited about the results thus far.

The old-school geek in me wants to see Digg be successful, if only for the fact that many consider it to be the site that kicked off the Web 2.0 craze many moons ago. This might be the kick it needs.

This year will be forever remembered as the year that we lost the most creative mind that Silicon Valley has ever seen, as well as one where a few rough Tech IPOs scared away potential future investors. We also said goodbye to some CEOs and tech founders, and Facebook stayed in the social networking driver’s seat.

Lets get into the year that was in Silicon Valley.

Steve Jobs

What can we say about Steve Jobs that hasn’t already been said? The founder and most memorable leader of Apple resigned as CEO in August, making way for the Tim Cook era. In his resignation letter, Jobs didn’t give an actual reason for leaving Apple, but suggested that Apple move on with its succession plan:

To the Apple Board of Directors and the Apple Community:

I have always said if there ever came a day when I could no longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple’s CEO, I would be the first to let you know. Unfortunately, that day has come.

Many assumed that the reason for Jobs stepping down was his failing health, and unfortunately that turned out to be the case when he passed away on October 6th. As a Silicon Valley icon, Steve Jobs brought Apple back to life, which launched the iPhone 4S and iPad 2 this year, showing that hard work and determination can indeed pay off. Even after his death, Jobs continued to make headlines, with his biography shattering records and topping charts.

Read all about Apple’s entire 2011 in our rewind.

IPOs

2011 was a big year for going public in the tech space. With much of the year being filled with rumblings about whether Facebook would go public or not, four other companies took the huge step of going for the IPO.

Here’s a timeline of big-name 2011 IPO filings:

• January: LinkedIn found a way to make money, so the time came to go public.
• February: Pandora went from nearly being toast, to becoming to the toast of tech.
• June: Groupon took the world by storm with its group buying model, but is the sizzle gone?
• July: Zynga relies heavily on Facebook for its revenue and game players, but that didn’t stop them from going for the IPO hailmary.

Unfortunately, most of these public offerings ended up tanking, but that shouldn’t stop companies from taking the leap next year.

Facebook and Yelp are the two companies to watch out for in IPO land next year.

Silicon Shuffles

A few major notable founders and CEOs left or were booted from their positions in 2011. Some of them included companies that were synonymous with “Web 2.0″, which was the beginning of the social web.

In March, Kevin Rose decided to resign from the company he started in 2004, Digg. After a short stint as CEO of the company in 2010, Rose decided to give the big goodbye to Digg this year. In many ways, Kevin Rose was a symbol of how cool it was to be an Internet entrepreneur, serving as a way more social and popular version of Mark Zuckerberg. His resignation came after an unsuccessful attempt to revive Digg’s community with a new version that everyone ended up hating. Don’t worry about Rose, he got funding for his new startup, Milk.

In September, Carol Bartz was fired as CEO of Yahoo!, over the phone no less. With Yahoo! seemingly having no leadership or direction, the rest of the year was filled with speculation on when Yahoo! would sell, and who it would sell to. Some of the names thrown around? Google, Microsoft, Aol, and Alibaba. No sale yet, and don’t hold your breath in 2012.

HP, which Steve Jobs had noted was “being dismembered, destroyed” fired its CEO this year, Leo Apotheker. However, Apotheker’s tenure didn’t even last a year and was replaced by former eBay CEO Meg Whitman.

But it wasn’t all about high profile departures, as Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey came back to the company in March to split time as an adviser as well as CEO of his Valley startup Square, putting 8 hour days in at both companies.

Facebook gets competition, remains king of social

The existence of a Google social network had been rumored for years, but this year we finally got to see what the company had come up with. In a huge direction change for the company, Google has decided to go all-in with social by launching Google+. In doing that, it shut down previous social failure Google Buzz.

Even though Google+ shows strong growth, Facebook remained the king of social in 2011. The company told us that they had 800 million users, but what was more impressive, it had 500 million users on the site at once.

Facebook didn’t stand pat amidst numerous privacy issues and launched numerous new features this year including Timeline. But what made Facebook the real king of Silicon Valley in 2011? The fact that it could bank 1 billion dollars in net revenue this year. Growth in users is one thing, features are another, but bringing in that type of bank puts it light-years ahead of Valley darlings like Twitter.

These are the stories that in one way or another narrated the entire year of innovation in 2011 on the left coast. What were your most memorable moments in Silicon Valley this year? Share them in the comments!

Sometimes you want to “dislike” something on Facebook. Something sad, or something stupid. The “Like” button forces you to interact in one way only, otherwise you don’t interact at all. The equivalent of the Like button on Google+ is of course the +1 button.

Thanks to this Chrome extension you can now click -1 for things that you don’t like. There’s one caveat though, only the other people who have installed this extension can see -1′s. I still find it to be useful though, if only to get out my aggression on posts that I flat-out can’t stand.

The extension is available for Chrome and Firefox

No sir, I don’t like it

Once you install the extension, the -1 button will appear right next to the +1.

Along with everyone else who uses the extension, your -1′s are recorded, tallied, and displayed with each post. Since not everyone can see how angry you are at the post, the extension prompts you to leave a comment for those who aren’t using it.

While this might seem like a silly add-on, I’ve often wondered why services like Facebook and Google+ try to focus on all things positive. I’d honestly like to see what posts rub people the wrong way, and this extension is a perfect way to do just that. For example, I always thought that Digg should have a minus button that would force its popularity down, because shoot, disliking something is as powerful as liking it.

So go on, install this extension and let everyone know that they got the big minus.

➤ -1 Minus One for Google+ – Chrome / Firefox

In its blog post Mike [raldi] writes that “There are only about 100 sites on the entire Internet that get a billion pageviews in a single month, and now reddit can put on its smoking jacket and join that exclusive club.” A club, mind you, that doesn’t include The New York Times, Expedia, Weather.com, about.com, or Fox News.

Reddit has grown tremendously this year, from 250 million page views in January 2010 to 829 million in December, and more than doubling its number of servers from 50 to 119 in the same timeframe.

In September 2010, reddit pageviews surpassed Digg’s, when Digg founder Kevin Rose revealed that his site only garnered 200 million page views in the month of July. Reddit claimed at the time that they were 40% bigger, traffic wise, than Digg. Then reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian’s adorable little alien, asked the press to “get with it,” and stop comparing reddit to Digg as a smaller community.

Mike [raldi] sends a big thank you to all of the reddit community:

This is an accomplishment that all redditors should take pride in, because people wouldn’t keep arriving in droves — and coming back — if not for the community that you’ve created here. To see how fast our little site’s been growing, contrast this post from July or this one from last month. Oh, and in case anyone was wondering, the billionth pageview was this submission.

The top-level categories on Digg are now My News, Top News, Upcoming, and Oatmeal. Leaving us wondering, how did Oatmeal pull that off?

Digg pretty much took a two-year hiatus from being awesome when Twitter and Facebook hit the Internet. It’s now back with a site re-design and looks like it’s trying to harness some pop-culture coolness. But even Oatmeal seems to think Digg is pretty crazy too.

And this just in from Victor Barrera, The Village Voice‘s Social Media strategist (sent by @Alex). A joke? Mystery solved? Funny Digg…ha, ha, ha? I guess you did get me to sign back into my account again.