What Really Is So Special About Digg? Kevin Rose Please Hurry Up And Sell!

I remember how excited I was about Digg when I first heard about it, and how I nearly wet myself the first time I got on the Digg homepage as I couldn’t believe the amount of traffic I was getting. Digg was a great concept when it came out i.e. letting readers choose what was popular and went on the homepage.

But what has Digg delivered since then in terms of product improvements? The only features of note are more categories and a cleaner look & feel. The digg algorithm that decides which articles make it onto the homepage has been ‘improved’ to try and stop users ‘gaming’ digg. But, all this algorithm appears to have done in my view is to give preference to trusted diggers, which in my view has turned digg into a site with a number of ‘editors’ and goes against what made Digg so exciting in the first place for me – giving everyone an equal chance of submitting an interesting story and getting it onto the homepage.

Where are the functional improvements? It’s useful being able to see how many Diggs an article has received to get a quick feel for whether it’s a good story or not, but Digg doesn’t offer much more than this to help users find useful and interesting articles. Digg has a huge treasure chest of useful stories and links in its archives, but there are no tools available to help find related articles to a particular article, and no advanced search engine to help whittle down results.

What about allowing users to create their own personalised homepage or feeds, where they can decide what topics they want to appear, add dugg articles from their friends automatically, decide what mix of popular and new articles to appear etc etc. Or how about a smart homepage like Google Reader that tries to predict what you’ll like to read based on what you’ve dugg, flamed or clicked on previously?

Digg is bound to get purchased at some point by some large player desperate to tap up the traffic and the key user demographic that Digg can provide. Hopefully when Kevin Rose finally sells out, Digg will get some decent developers and will finally live up to its early promise.