Digg iPhone Beta Live!
Last weekend Joe Stump, Daniel Burka, and I sat down and white-boarded the Digg iPhone app. I told Joe if he coded it in 48hrs, I'd buy him an iPhone. Needless to say, he got it done (nice work, Joe). — You can check it out at digg.com/iphone.
Context & Ripple Effects
This closes a six-month loop of Digg-meets-iPhone news: Kevin Rose was fielding questions about the device as far back as December 2006, and Webware wrote up a Digg version for the iPhone in mid-June. Today's post converts that outside attention into an official Digg property at digg.com/iphone.
The build story is doing double duty as the marketing: Joe Stump coded the app in 48 hours after a whiteboard session with Daniel Burka and Rose, and TechCrunch picked the launch up the same day — a small team shipping faster than most companies' release cycles.
First-order effects
- Digg now has a dedicated, optimized front door for iPhone users rather than relying on generic browser access or third-party writeups, with the founding design team (Rose, Burka) and lead developer Stump attached by name.
- TechCrunch's same-day pickup puts the launch in front of the early-adopter audience most likely to both own an iPhone and drive submissions on Digg itself.
Second-order effects
- The founder-as-promoter pattern repeats: just as Rose's iPhone comments carried the story in December 2006, the bet-an-iPhone-on-a-weekend-build anecdote spreads this one — Digg's product announcements and its founders' personal brands remain inseparable.
- Every high-traffic consumer web service now faces an implicit expectation to ship an iPhone-tuned version, since Digg's move sets a visible benchmark for what a fast team can do with the device.
Third-order effects
- In the absence of any established native-app channel for the iPhone, optimized browser versions become the de facto distribution strategy for consumer web brands — favoring small, fast-moving teams like Digg's over slower incumbents while that channel remains undefined.
The trend: Consumer web services are racing to claim iPhone mindshare through lightweight browser-optimized versions before any formal native distribution channel exists.