Digg Is Being Rebuilt From Scratch And It Needs Your Help

We brought you the news last week that Digg was bought for a paltry $500,000. Granted, that wasn’t the full story as Digg was split apart and sold to numerous buyers. Betaworks bought the domain...
Digg Is Being Rebuilt From Scratch And It Needs Your Help
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  • We brought you the news last week that Digg was bought for a paltry $500,000. Granted, that wasn’t the full story as Digg was split apart and sold to numerous buyers. Betaworks bought the domain and copyright for reasons that weren’t revealed until today.

    Betaworks, as part of a new blog, asks its readers to “Rethink Digg.” Here’s what they have to say:

    As betaworks and Digg both announced on their blogs, we are taking over Digg and turning it back into a startup. What they didn’t mention is that we’re rebuilding it from scratch. In six weeks.

    On August 1, after an adrenaline and caffeine-fueled six weeks, we’re rolling out a new v1. With this launch, we’re taking the first step towards (re)making Digg the best place to find, read and share the most interesting and talked about stories on the Internet — and we want your help.

    As for the details, the team at Betaworks’ News.me is going to be rebuilding Digg as a new service for people to share news. They are building the new Digg on for key tenants:

  • We make it easy to find, read, and share the most interesting and talked about stories on the Internet.
  • The experience must be fast and thin. Let users go, and they will come back to you. We optimize for return visits, not pageviews per visit.
  • Build an experience that is native to each device: smart phone, inbox, Web page. Stories must find the user, wherever they are.
  • Users must be able to share where they and their friends already are — on networks like Facebook, Twitter and email.
  • Upon these principles, the team hopes to resurrect Digg while continuing work on News.me. After both products are up to snuff, they want to integrate both into the same service under the Digg brand. They also want to do away with the negative brand image that Digg has gotten over the years and create “the beginning of a new generation for Digg – a restoration of what was brilliant and disruptive and a reinvention of what was not.”

    So, I’ll guess we’ll find out on August 1 if the new Digg is anything worth checking out. It’s already pretty obvious that Reddit is the new king on the block and Digg has a lot of ground to cover. The team at News.me seems pretty passionate about Digg, however, and it will be interesting to see how it all plays out.

    As an aside, they want users to fill out a short survey to tell them where you want Digg to go next. It will help them “rethink Digg.”

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