DIGG: New Digg Profiles Launch
The Digg team is excited to launch new Digg user profiles later tonight, the first of many cool new features rolling out this year. — We've completely revamped our profiles from the ground up - making it easy for you to share your favorite stories …
Context & Ripple Effects
Digg built its audience as a crowd-ranked link aggregator, but by mid-2007 it was already behaving like a social platform: a December 2006 wave of new features began the shift, an iPhone web app followed in July, and Compete's May 2007 data put Digg at 22.6 million unique visitors, ahead of Facebook's 20.2 million.
Today's profile revamp is the next step in that arc — BusinessWeek frames it the same day as Digg 'going deeper with social networking,' and TechCrunch's pickup asks pointedly whether Digg wants to be Facebook. The company says these profiles are the first of many features planned for the year.
First-order effects
- Digg users get rebuilt profile pages designed for sharing favorite stories and finding like-minded friends, converting anonymous voters into identifiable members with a persistent presence.
Second-order effects
- With traffic already rivaling Facebook's by Compete's May 2007 count, Digg's move onto Facebook's home turf — identity and friend-finding rather than just story ranking — pressures the incumbent social networks to defend their differentiation beyond the social graph.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds through Digg's planned 2007 feature rollouts, the line between news aggregation and social networking keeps blurring, with crowd-ranked content sites competing on member identity and connections rather than ranking algorithms alone.
The trend: Consumer web services are layering persistent identity and social graphs on top of content ranking, converging the news aggregator and the social network into a single product category.