Kevin Rose has been eluding to some really big changes over at Digg lately. In his interview with Michael Arrington, Kevin went as far to say that the new directions for Digg are “a ballsy move”. During Digg’s Townhall Meeting that aired last night, founder Kevin Rose and CEO Jay Adelson announced lots of upcoming changes that include removal of the shout feature, better sharing on Twitter and Facebook, and a redesign of the homepage. All of this is rumored to be moving Digg toward a more real-time interface that, according to Kevin Rose’s interview with Michael Arrington, should catapult popular stories with a few thousand Diggs to tens of thousands of Diggs.
A ten fold increase in the number of Diggs for a given story is a very tall order to say the least and there’s only a few ways to make such a great leap possible in such a short period of time. To make that happen Digg will have to widen the bottlenecks to traffic flow and create new or more efficient ports of entry for flowing traffic and shared content. Digg may be planning to address such issues by doing the following:
1. Increasing visibility via search engines – Ranking well in SERPs by serving up relevant real-time news submissions to Google would certainly give Digg a powerful traffic boost. Digg’s Diggbar (a.k.a. spambar) initially attempted to capitalize on the SEO benefits of the shortened URLs created by users sharing content. Thankfully by speaking out we were able to thwart off such attempts of thievery. I imagine Kevin Rose still has an interest in using off-site content to drive traffic to Digg though. This time however, I’m betting that it won’t be the news stories that will lead the way but rather Digg’s user comments about those stories that will provide Digg with the advantage it’s looking for. If Kevin can enable the sharing of those comments while still linking them back to Digg, that would definitely help. Hence, this may explain why Kevin said “that was part of the reason why we rolled out a pretty awesome search, ya know…it was kind of us experimenting with some of that”. Meaning that Digg developers also wanted to see if they could create a search engine to effectively index comments and content quickly enough to deliver real-time on-site search abilities just as Twitter does.
2. Increasing visibility on other popular websites – Replacing the shout feature and implementing better sharing tools that plug into incredibly popular websites like Facebook and Twitter can expose Digg to new users and obtain more diggs. It also greatly enhances the sharing/spreading of Digg comments throughout the Web.
3. Increasing user’s visibility to fellow users – Kevin Rose made several relevant comments during the Digg Townhall meeting which suggested there would not be a reason to have an upcoming section on Digg and that the new design will be more of a “living, breathing site”. Such comments suggest that the new design will entail changing the community structure of Digg to be more akin to Twitter’s in which you are able to see what your friends are Digging in real-time thereby allowing you to easily Digg your friends’ stories too.
4. Increasing the longevity of a story – This would would entail increasing the window of time for which a story could acquire more diggs. This is part of the genius behind Twitter’s community and why it’s such an effective tool for driving traffic. Unlike Digg, Twitter’s capacity at driving traffic to one’s site is not nearly as short-lived and fleeting. That is, once a story reaches the homepage of Digg, traffic quickly falls off because the story becomes dated and it is replaced by the next day’s content. Twitter on the other hand, doesn’t list news stories as a function of time and therefore people will continue to tweet a given story many days after it’s been published.
Taken together, it’s likely we will see Digg launch a design that is primarily based of the architecture of Twitter. Incidentally, Kevin Rose’s infatuation with Twitter isn’t new; Pownce was Kevin’s first attempt at a me-too startup and WeFollow, a directory of Twitter users, is just his latest attempt to cash in on Twitter’s juggernaut success. I’m afraid Kevin’s capacity for creating original products appears to have eluded him since the creation of Digg. Interestingly, if indeed the new design of Digg turns out to be very much like Twitter, it would most likely tarnish the originality of Kevin’s claim to fame.
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