The New Digg With A Streamlined Look, Is Now Live
Just about a month after the acquisition of Digg and the announcement about the complete redesign of the news aggregation site, New York based, Beta Works has delivered and in fact, a day earlier than the initial announced August 1st deadline. The preview of the redesigned Digg site, iOS app and mobile web was introduced on July 30 before making them live the next day.
“On July 20, we announced that we were turning Digg back into a startup and rebuilding it from scratch in six weeks. After an intense month and a half, we managed to get the new Digg up and running on a fresh code base and infrastructure. We now have a solid foundation on which to build, and we expect to build fast. Yesterday, we previewed the new Digg applications for web, iPhone, and mobile web and today we’re happy to share Digg v1.”, says the blog post announcing the new Digg.
The redesign is not just cosmetic but goes much deeper just like Betaworks said in a blog post in July. All the earlier terms from the old Digg, such as “Newsrooms,” “Newsbar,” and “Newswire” has been done away with, making way for a fresh look which is much simpler and makes ample use of images to highlight news. “Top Stories,” “Popular Stories,” and “Upcoming.” are the new terms that have been added instead.
Another major change that has been brought is in the wat Digg scores will be evaluated, taking both Facebook and Twitter popularity into consideration rather than just the popularity of the news in Digg.
The one thing missing, however, in the current version is the commenting system. Betaworks had in fact explained that due to the development process being on a fast pace, certain features would be missing in the early version but would be added in the subsequent updates. Changes are also expected to be made to the commenting system with new measures added in to prevent spams.
As for the iOS app, apart from featuring the new way of sharing and reading news, it will also have offline reading mode called a geo-fencing feature called “Paperboy”.
Betaworks still maintains its stance against posting ads or allowing sponsorship. In the FAQ section Betaworks says, “We have little time and fewer resources to focus on anything but the user, who is our first, second, and third priority. We believe we can accomplish with 10 great engineers and designers what other companies do with a hundred and, by keeping our costs low, take our time to find a business model that does not disrupt or detract from the user experience.”
