Digg Goes Deeper with Social Networking
With its audience expanding and interests diversifying, the popular site is launching new features to help users find like-minded friends — When Jay Adelson and Kevin Rose launched Digg three years ago, the Web site attracted a community of like-minded people.
Context & Ripple Effects
The friend-finding rollout is the latest step in an arc TechBeat flagged in June 2006, when Digg was already being positioned as a site headed 'not just for geeks anymore.' Since then the company has kept widening its surface area — including a beta iPhone web app launched in July 2007 built by Joe Stump's team in 48 hours — while commentary has questioned whether its crowd wisdom is always right even as its crowdsourced rankings top lists of popular news stories.
Today's move reframes what Digg is: Jay Adelson and Kevin Rose's three-year-old site began as a community of like-minded people who needed no help finding each other, but with the audience expanding and interests diversifying, discovery between users has become a product problem in itself. The revamped profiles are confirmed as the first of many features planned for the year, making this a platform shift rather than a one-off release.
First-order effects
- Digg users get new profiles and friend-discovery tools immediately, shifting the site's core loop from voting on links alone to building persistent connections between accounts.
- Jay Adelson and Kevin Rose commit to a multi-feature roadmap for the rest of 2007, putting engineering resources behind social features rather than additional content categories.
Second-order effects
- Rival news aggregators face pressure to add their own identity and friend layers, since Digg's user graph — once built — raises switching costs that raw link votes never did.
- Broader-audience members who arrived after the enthusiast era gain a reason to stay, changing the mix of stories that reach the homepage and testing the 'mob wisdom' critics have already questioned.
Third-order effects
- Social bookmarking and social networking are converging into a single category where every content site needs a social graph, eroding the boundary that made Digg distinct from Facebook-style networks.
- If the pattern holds, platform value migrates from the algorithm that ranks content to the relationships that personalize it — a structure later entrants inherit whether or not Digg keeps its lead.
The trend: Social news sites are evolving from crowdsourced ranking engines into full social networks, adding identity layers as their audiences broaden beyond early adopters.