As the avalanche of information coming through social networks and real-time tools like Twitter continues to grow, the need for filters to make sense of that tsunami of data also increases, and it seems as though everyone has a different way of trying to solve that problem. Facebook threw its hat into the ring this week with what it says is an improved “newspaper-style” news feed that highlights important content, while Digg has just launched “newsrooms” aimed at doing the same thing, and online influence-ranking service Klout is rolling out topic pages based on what’s being shared by those with influence. But will any of these be able to solve the filtering problem, or will they just add another source of noise?

Facebook says that its changes (which my colleague Colleen covered for GigaOM) are designed to create “your own personal newspaper” when you log in to the social network, by showing you what the site believes are the most important items at the top of your news feed. In effect, this merges what Facebook used to call “top news” — which you previously had to select from a drop-down menu — with your regular news stream. And Facebook is also going to use its algorithms to show you different items based on when you last logged in to the site, so that what you see is always “new.”

When you pick up a newspaper after not reading it for a week, the front page quickly clues you into the most interesting stories. In the past, News Feed hasn’t worked like that. [Now] News Feed will act more like your own personal newspaper. You won’t have to worry about missing important stuff. All your news will be in a single stream with the most interesting stories featured at the top.

Facebook wants to be your newspaper

The repeated use of the term “newspaper” makes it obvious that Facebook wants this new feature to be about more than just seeing updates from your friend’s birthday party — and it could become especially interesting when combined with another new Facebook feature: the launch of the “Subscribe” service, which allows users to follow and get updates from people or sources they are not friends with, in much the same way that Twitter does. Facebook has been promoting that feature as a way to stay connected to what celebrities and journalists are doing, and it seems likely that many of those items could wind up on the top of your “personal newspaper” thanks to the news feed changes.

Digg, meanwhile, also seems to be betting that it can help sort the news for people via what it is calling topic-based “newsrooms” — and that launching this kind of option might help restore some of the site’s faded glory, which took a beating after a disastrous relaunch in 2010 that caused many users to flee. One of the elements of that redesign was a focus on news from mainstream sources such as traditional media outlets, which seemed to irritate many long-time Digg fans. The “newsroom” launch takes a different tack: instead of allowing media outlets to plug their RSS feeds directly into Digg, the service is creating pages that will feature content that has been shared by highly-ranked users.

This is similar to what Klout is trying to do with its topic pages, which the site says are currently in limited beta, but will be rolled out to all users soon. While Digg is basing its “newroom” content on what gets shared by users who are ranked highly by other members of Digg, the topic pages at Klout are created from content shared by those who the service’s algorithms have determined have a lot of influence about a certain topic — based on their activity on Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and other social networks (including Google+, which the service just recently started including in its rankings).

Relevance is a tricky problem to solve

For me, both the Digg and Klout approaches suffer from the same kind of problem that many other filtering services do — including iPad apps such as News.me and Zite, or web-based services such as Summify: either they are filled with the same content I’ve have already seen in other places, or the links simply aren’t relevant. Klout’s topic pages in particular contain all kinds of things that are barely even related to the topic, although that could be because they are still tweaking their algorithms. And recommendation systems are one of those things that can seem almost useless even when they are getting a lot of things right, because the parts that are wrong are so glaringly obvious.

As for Facebook’s attempt to create a “personalized newspaper,” the biggest issue for Facebook is that it is still used primarily as a social network for connecting with friends and family, and so doesn’t function as a real-time news and information network in the same way that Twitter does — or rather, it is a news and information network, but that news is still primarily personal. There’s a place for that, obviously, but it doesn’t really help filter the “news” in a broader sense. The launch of a subscription feature is clearly an attempt to move Facebook in that direction, but so far — as I’ve argued before — Twitter still seems to be winning that particular game.

It’s good that plenty of services are trying to solve the news-filtering problem, and different users may choose different solutions: for some, Twitter will be the best because it is brief, while others might prefer Google+ or the summaries that they get once a day from services like Summify or an app like AOL’s Editions. So far, no one seems to have come up with the one-size-fits-all solution to this modern dilemma.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users Arvind Grover and Zarko Drincic

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• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution
• Finding the Value in Social Media Data
• A 2011 NewNet Forecast

There’s only one technology story that matters to most geeks this week, and that’s the departure of Steve Jobs, the iconic CEO of Apple. But there are other icons in the geek community — although their influence may not be quite as widespread as the Apple founder’s, and they may not run multibillion-dollar companies — and one of them has also announced his departure. Rob Malda, also known as CmdrTaco, is stepping aside from the pioneering online community Slashdot, which he founded 14 years ago. Long before Digg came along, or Hacker News, or even Metafilter, the community Malda created was the go-to spot for geeks to talk about the news that mattered to them. That hasn’t gone away; if anything, it has gone mainstream.

As he describes in a Slashdot post about his decision to leave, Malda created the site with friend Jeff “Hemos” Bates when the two were still in college, running it from an old server stuffed under Malda’s desk where he worked as a programmer. Later, the two began to run Slashdot as a business, and went through a bewildering series of corporate owners over the next decade — first they were acquired by Andover, which then merged with VA Linux, which had gone public in a star-studded IPO that saw the stock climb as high as $239, only to crater along with most of the other dot-com bubble stocks. As Malda notes:

Since Slashdot was founded, my business card has read Blockstackers, Andover, Andover.net, VA Linux Systems, VA Software, OSDN, OSTG, SourceForge, and finally Geeknet. My title has changed several times: from my first card which read “Lies and Misinformation”, until today when my title read “Editor-in-Chief of Slashdot.org”.

The turmoil of ownership didn’t stop Slashdot from growing, however, to the point where it had over 5 million visitors a month in 2006. For years before Digg came along, it was the must-read site for anyone interested in Linux and other open-source technologies, but also in the emerging business of mobile communications — long before everyone had a smartphone — and other technologies that are now thought of as mainstream. Slashdot’s “upmod,” a vote for a smart comment or thread, was the dominant geek status symbol, a predecessor to the “digg” vote and the Facebook “like.”

The “Slashdot effect”

Slashdot was also the first to swamp websites with crippling amounts of traffic after a link got posted, a phenomenon that became known as the “Slashdot effect” (later replaced by the Digg effect and the Stumbleupon effect, among others). Werner Vogels — CTO of Amazon, whose cloud-based servers now host a lot of websites — paid tribute to this in a post to Twitter on Thursday about Malda’s departure:

Rob, thanks for slashdot-effect, you put the fear of scaling into everyone – Rob "@CmdrTaco" Malda Resigns From Slashdot wv.ly/qKzQ7b—
Werner Vogels (@Werner) August 25, 2011

Slashdot also created what is still one of the best examples of a self-regulating online community, a status it shares with Metafilter (another site that began as a one-man show in the late 1990s, when it was created by Matt Haughey, who still runs the service). In order to prevent “flamers” and trolls from taking over the system and ruining it for others — something new communities like Google+ are also struggling with — Slashdot developed a pioneering moderation system that awards “karma” points to readers for their behavior on the site, and then selects moderators from that group. In true Slashdot fashion, it then open-sourced the code for this system.

Media and news communities that are focused on one demographic or interest group, like sports or entertainment, are fairly common now. But Slashdot was one of the first to show that the web could sustain something like that by focusing on what was then a relatively narrow niche. Says Malda:

Slashdot has been read by kernel engineers and billionaires. By sys-admins and CEOs. By high school kids and government bureaucrats. But what brings so many of them together is that we are nerds.

The geeks took over the world

In some ways, the decline of Slashdot as a force in the geek world has come about not because the site lost any authority or popularity, but because geeks and tech news and the Internet itself have become such a mainstream thing over the past decade. When Slashdot first began, there weren’t many other places to talk about the newest processor from Intel or the development of web technology like Ajax, or concepts like “virtual reality” — apart from the Usenet newsgroups that were the predecessor to most online geek communities. Now, those kinds of topics are everywhere. As Malda notes in his goodbye post:

The internet has changed dramatically since I started here, and that’s part of my reason for leaving. For me, the Slashdot of today is fused to the Slashdot of the past. This makes it really hard to objectively consider the future of the site.

In the media world, the departure of pioneering blogger Jim Romenesko — who also announced his semi-retirement on Wednesday — falls into much the same category. When Romenesko started a “column” (which was really a blog) reporting snippets of info about the media world and linking to interesting stories and news, it was one of a kind. Now, that same kind of thing occurs everywhere, from mainstream media to news aggregators like Mediagazer. Although they were strange beasts when Romenesko started, blogs have become part of the media firmament.

Twitter has become the news network

And for both Slashdot and Romenesko, of course — and plenty of other pioneering news and technology communities — the real competitor that has taken some of the wind from their sails is Twitter. As news events like the Steve Jobs resignation and the fall of Tripoli show, the service has the ability to become a real-time information network like no other. Instead of relying on aggregators or link-sharing sites, users can become their own aggregators, following those who post unique or valuable content and creating their own real-time news wires on the fly. That’s pretty hard to compete with.

That’s not to say there isn’t value to having a community like Slashdot or Metafilter, of course, because there is. The personal touch, the camaraderie among members, the long debates about whether Vi or Emacs is the best Linux text editor — those things can only occur in a community like Slashdot. But that is a smaller game than it used to be, as Digg has found out. In any case, as I mentioned in my recent post about online music pioneer Michael Robertson, sometimes we need to pay tribute to the pioneers, without whom there would be no land to settle.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

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• Finding the Value in Social Media Data
• In Q3, Big Data Meant Big Dollars
• Facebook Remained Social Media’s Chief in Q3

Can we find clues about the future of news and journalism in the way a link-sharing site like Reddit operates? David Weinberger, co-author of the seminal Web 2.0 book The Cluetrain Manifesto, took a look at that question over the weekend and came to the conclusion that yes, we can — not that Reddit is the future of news, necessarily, but that it could be part of a potential future for media and journalism. Weinberger’s argument has some merit to it, and it’s a good reminder that the eventual replacement for what we see as the mainstream news media may look very different from what we are used to.

As Weinberger describes in his post, Reddit has developed a number of interesting features, in addition to simply allowing users to share and comment on links to interesting or quirky articles from around the web — something that other sites like Digg (which has seen a dramatic decline in traffic recently, after a traumatic redesign) and Fark also do. In Reddit’s case, however, it has also added some quasi-journalistic features, such as “Today I Learned” and the popular “I Am A… Ask Me Anything” series.

In “Today I Learned,” users at Reddit post facts that are interesting in some way, or that run counter to conventional wisdom. While this is similar to what many newspapers and other traditional media outlets do, there is no editorial control over the “facts” that are posted. Instead, the Reddit community fact-checks the information after the post goes up (some journalists would, no doubt, argue that this isn’t the way newspapers work, but in many cases, newspaper and magazine articles are also fact-checked and verified by commenters).

Crowd-powered interviews

The more interesting of the Reddit features, however, is the IAMA series. In these, a user posts a comment that describes themselves in some way, and offers to answer any question from the Reddit community. Some recent examples included a woman with a serious disease, a man who recently sold his company for millions of dollars, a writer who worked on The Simpsons TV show , and a U.S. Navy officer serving on a submarine. The quality of comments and responses varies widely, but as Weinberger notes:

[I]t’s not exactly “60 Minutes.” So what? This is one way citizen journalism looks. At its best, it asks questions we all want asked, unearths questions we didn’t know we wanted asked, asks them more forthrightly than most American journalists dare, and gets better — more honest — answers than we hear from the mainstream media.

And while the “Today I Learned” feature only gets the fact-checking that interested commenters provide, the “Ask Me Anything” series is moderated by administrators at Reddit — in other words, editors — who in many cases will ask the person submitting to the interview to verify their identity in some way (the discussion itself is also moderated for offensive comments, as all Reddit threads are).

Reinventing community journalism?

I agree with Weinberger that this looks and feels a lot like a form of community journalism, or “crowd-powered” journalism. At the newspaper I used to work for, we used a live-blogging tool called Cover It Live (now owned by Demand Media) to host live discussions with people in the news — eyewitnesses to a news event, scientists who released research reports, and other newsmakers of various kinds — in which readers would ask questions and have them answered.

The IAMA feature at Reddit feels very similar, and it also feels a little like what occurs over at Quora, where people in the news often respond to direct questions from users (Quora has also recently started setting up actual interviews). Are these things inherently different or less valuable because they don’t involve a newspaper or occur at a mainstream media website? I don’t think so.

Many people, including (but not limited to) traditional journalists and media-industry players, think the replacement for newspapers and magazines and other mainstream entities will look more or less the same as the things they are replacing — that the replacement for a community newspaper will look like a newspaper, and so on. But that may not be the case at all. Some communities may get their news from Facebook, or a local blog, or a discussion forum on Topix.net, or from something like Reddit. That may not be great for the newspapers, which used to fill that niche, but the communities themselves may be better off, or at least not inconvenienced.

As Weinberger notes, what sites like Reddit and Quora do very well is take advantage of the social elements of the news and media — in many cases, far better than their traditional media competitors. This is just a small part of the disruption that the media industry is undergoing, which includes the rise of collaborative tools and the explosion of non-journalistic sources via social-media platforms like Twitter, such as the man who live-tweeted the raid on Osama Bin Laden.

Obviously, Reddit and its ilk aren’t a replacement for investigative journalism, or foreign reporting, or any of the other valuable things that major newspapers like the New York Times or the Washington Post provide. But they can be players in a much broader journalistic ecosystem, and they have lessons to teach traditional media players, if they want to listen.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users Garry Knight and Jennie Moo

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• Digg Relaunch Shows How Hard it is to Change Your Game
• Finding the Value in Social Media Data
• How Media Companies Can Compete Online

Digg, the link-sharing site that was once the top of the social-news heap, has launched a new feature it hopes will bring users back to the service: Newswire allows readers to create their own filtered view of the links that are being submitted to Digg in real time, which the site calls “sifting for diamonds.” But after a disastrous redesign that caused many users to flee the network, and the departure of founder and chief visionary Kevin Rose — not to mention the rise of Twitter and newer sharing platforms like Google+ — can new features such as Newswire help the site recapture any of its faded glory?

As Digg staffer Will Larson describes on the company blog, the Newswire allows users to not only see posts appear in real time as they are submitted to the site, but to filter that stream based on a number of factors — including the number of Diggs they have received, what topic they are related to, and whether they contain video or images. There’s also a “trending” view that ranks the posts coming in by how quickly they are receiving Digg votes. In a break with Digg tradition, the Newswire also shows who “buried” or voted down a post or link, which the site hopes will increase transparency.

Filtering incoming links and watching them appear in real time is a handy thing to have. But is the new Digg feature anything revolutionary? Not really. Some reviewers have called it a “radical experiment” in social news, but it’s anything but radical. Many users already get a similar blend of trending links and commentary from Twitter and related services such as Topsy and Tweetmeme that show popularity — and a number of apps like Flipboard and Zite provide a curated, real-time newswire-style experience. Does Digg bring something dramatically different to the table? Not that I can see.

Even a Digg staffer notes in a comment on the thread about the Newswire launch that “making upcoming real time with Newswire is simply catching up with the general trends,” while one long-time Digg user described it as being little more than an updated version of an earlier feature called Digg Spy, which was launched in 2005. While the Digg users commenting on the launch seem to think the Newswire is a great addition, it’s not clear whether it will be enough to draw in new users or bring back old ones.

Digg Version 4 repelled users

Many of those departed users, who in some cases were Digg’s most devoted fans, fled the service after a mammoth redesign, known internally as Version 4. The redesign was in the works for more than a year, but when it launched last summer, it sparked widespread criticism and outrage from existing users — in part because it was seen as altering the independent culture of the site by appealing too much to mainstream media sites. Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of Digg competitor Reddit, said in an open letter to Kevin Rose that the redesign “reeks of VC meddling” and was little more than “cobbling together features from more popular sites,” and many users seemed to agree.

In the months following the launch of the new design, Rose stepped down as CEO to be replaced by Matt Williams, who almost immediately apologized for the flaws in the redesign — and the site proceeded to undo or roll-back almost all of the changes that had been made (and laid off about 40 percent of its staff at the same time). But the damage had already been done: Digg’s user base continued to decline, to the point where Compete.com says it is now only slightly larger than Reddit with about 3 million unique visitors a month, down from more than 8 million a year ago.

In terms of overall traffic, Compete says that Reddit is now about twice as large as Digg, with 14 million page views a month to Digg’s 7 million, while Quantcast shows Reddit as being almost three times larger in unique visitors and four times the size of Digg in terms of monthly page views with about 44 million to Digg’s 9 million.

In a move that seemed to cement the network’s decline in popularity, founder Kevin Rose left Digg earlier this year, and has started a new incubator for mobile apps and services called Milk. Matt Williams said earlier this year that the site’s traffic had “stabilized” and that he continues to believe Digg can be a major player when it comes to filtering the news that continues to bombard web users from multiple sources.

But while features like Newswire may be positive additions to the former superstar’s bag of tricks, it’s going to take a lot more than me-too services to bring back its faded glory. The harsh truth is that Digg’s time may have come and gone.

Disclosure: Milk is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

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• Finding the Value in Social Media Data
• Content Farms: The Players, The Benefits, The Risks
• Players and Strategies for Real-Time In-Stream Advertising

The company today is launching a new +1 feature that allows folks who are users of Google services such as Gmail, Google Talk, Google Reader and Google Profiles to rank the search results. Think of it as Google’s retweet gesture, and a way of social validation. If you think a search result is a good one, you can click on +1 and that helps rank a search result higher. Update: A company spokesperson says the company hopes to test adding these +1s to search results to help a result rank higher. You can also undo your +1 click.

So when you use the search while logged into Google, you will be able to see who added +1 to a specific search result from your social graph – in this case, your contacts in various Google services such as Gmail, Google Contacts and folks you are following on Google Reader and Buzz. Google says it will add Twitter login support in the near future.

Google is also using the +1 social validation system for its ads as well. Google is looking to offer the +1 services to publishers, which will be able to embed the +1 button on their pages much like the Tweet This and Digg This buttons. As the company explains on the Google Blog:

We expect that these personalized annotations will help sites stand out by showing users which search results are personally relevant to them. As a result, +1’s could increase both the quality and quantity of traffic to the sites people care about.

But the +1 button isn’t just for search results. We’re working on a +1 button that you can put on your pages too, making it easy for people to recommend your content on Google search without leaving your site. If you want to be notified when the +1 button is available for your website, you can sign up for email updates at our +1 webmaster site.

I’m glad Google is taking this small but important step and using “social validations” to improve its core offering. I’m just surprised that the company took so long to come to this realization. Social validation is a behavior that has gone mainstream – thanks to the likes of Digg, StumbleUpon, Bit.ly, Twitter and most importantly, Facebook. Google’s implementation isn’t obtrusive and is a good idea. I hope it becomes popular, and in the process, hopefully improves search on the web.

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• Big Data 2011 Preview
• In Q3, Big Data Meant Big Dollars
• Facebook Remained Social Media’s Chief in Q3

Venture capital investor Mike Maples, who launched the Floodgate Partners fund last year and is an investor in Twitter, defends the company’s seemingly gigantic market valuation — saying it has a chance to become a fundamental and important company in the tech industry, or what he calls a “thunder lizard.” Maples also said the company is changing the media, news and entertainment industries. The VC made the comments during an appearance on Bloomberg Television on Thursday night (video of which is embedded below), and also talked about the possibility that co-founder Jack Dorsey might return to the company. Here are some of his remarks:

• On Twitter’s market value. “I do not think Twitter is being valued on today’s or next year’s revenues, but really the chance that they could become a fundamental and important company in the software or tech business at large. I think a lot of people can defend that they are a strategically relevant company. They are changing media, news, entertainment and they have done it in less than five years.”
• On Twitter’s goals. “They are a very idealistic company. I think they are still very much in the phase of driving usage and engagement and trying to be the best service they can be. I think they understand that if they achieve that goal, success will come their way. They have plenty of time and plenty of money.”
• On Jack Dorsey’s return. “I think Jack is a supreme talent as an entrepreneur and as a product person, and so any influence he can have on Twitter is obviously good for me as an investor.”
• On “thunder lizards.” “Godzilla was hatched from radioactive atomic eggs and swam across the ocean and started to destroy cities. I always thought that was a good metaphor for the disruptive startup. The atomic eggs are sort of a metaphor for the thunder lizard ambitions of a company…. Twitter is starting to show some thunder lizard traits. They are encroaching.”

Maples also talked about what has happened to Digg (in which he has also invested), saying the company probably got too much credit when it “was really famous and everyone was in love with it,” but that he thinks the market has probably gone too far in the opposite direction now. “I think Digg is on the right track,” he said, adding that the site “just needs to focus on their users one day at a time. I do not feel too sorry for a site that still has tens of millions of users, so I think that they’ve still got a shot.”

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• In Q3, Big Data Meant Big Dollars
• Facebook Remained Social Media’s Chief in Q3
• Report: NoSQL Databases – Providing Extreme Scale and Flexibility

Birthdays are a natural time for reflection, even if you’re only five years old, which is the age Twitter officially turned today. It may not seem like much, but that’s about 35 in Internet years, which means the company is close to being middle-aged — and Twitter has definitely been struggling with some mid-life challenges lately. Another much-hyped web startup is also facing some middle-age sag: Digg turned six in December and has been struggling after a failed redesign and the departure of founder Kevin Rose. And Digg’s decline from pioneering Web 2.0 service to social media also-ran contains some lessons for its younger peers.

In some ways, it’s hard to believe that Twitter has been around for five years. Launched by Jack Dorsey and Biz Stone as a side project within Evan Williams’ company Odeo — which was later shut down, with Williams taking over from Dorsey as CEO of Twitter, in a move that caused some bad blood — Twitter didn’t seem like much when it first launched, even to a die-hard web junkie like Om. Like most users, I thought the service was fairly useless when I joined in early 2007, and I spent months wondering what I was supposed to do with it before a critical mass of interesting people joined and value started to emerge.

Twitter’s status as a powerful real-time news platform didn’t really become clear until it was used to transmit updates about the forest fires in California in 2007 and during an earthquake in China in 2008. Gradually, people started to see it as something other than just a way of talking about what you were having for lunch — and when Janis Krums posted a picture of a plane crash-landing in the Hudson in 2009, the reality of Twitter started to go mainstream.

Every subsequent event, from the earthquake in Haiti to the recent uprisings in the Middle East, has reinforced the idea that the service dramatically lowers the barriers to entry for publishing, as Williams put it last year.

More than anything else, however, Twitter has become a platform for community — whether it’s a community of people interested in revolutions in the Middle East, or a community that is obsessed with the latest product release from Apple, or a community that wants to know what Charlie Sheen is doing right now. And one of the hallmarks of a social service like Twitter and Facebook is that the more people use it to connect with each other, the more they feel like they own it to some extent — and that feeling is what Twitter is currently fighting as it tries to mature as a company and as a business.

You can see that in the outraged responses to the recent Quick Bar fiasco, and to the shutting down of third-party clients like Bill Gross’s UberMedia — which has been trying to develop its own competing monetization strategy for the social network — and to the rollout of services such as Promoted Tweets and Promoted Trends. As I’ve argued before, users have grown so used to seeing Twitter as a utility that every move the company makes to add money-making layers is seen as an affront in some sense, like someone invited you to a party at their house and now is asking you to settle up your bar bill.

Although the two services are different in many ways, Digg has also been struggling with the same kinds of issues. And some of those struggles are directly related to Twitter, since Digg’s link-sharing features — which were once a pioneering example of what some called Web 2.0 — have been largely superseded by the growth of Twitter and Facebook. But Digg has also rolled out its own poorly-received design features: the service launched Digg v4 last August and the new design was roundly criticized as unstable and (more importantly) a breach of faith with the traditional Digg community. The site’s traffic plummeted, the new CEO rolled back most of the new features and laid off almost 40 percent of the staff, and founder Kevin Rose is moving on to start a new venture.

So what are the lessons that Digg has to teach Twitter? One is that even pioneering services, whose founders appear on the covers of leading business magazines, can be overtaken by events, and by other services that don’t even exist yet. Yes, it’s true that Twitter is supposedly worth $10 billion, and is much larger than Digg ever was. But that lesson still applies (as MySpace is well aware). It’s easy to grow complacent and inward-looking, and thereby miss the warning signs of declining growth, or be too slow to react.

The other lesson is that the core of a social network is the community of users — and in Twitter’s case, the community of developers or ecosystem that has grown up around the service as well.

Alienating either or both of those groups is a very risky strategy, as Digg has discovered since it unilaterally rolled out its unwelcome series of changes with little or no discussion with users. The hard-boiled approach that Twitter is taking could pay off for the company if it succeeds in building features that bring in revenue, but at the same time those changes in attitude could ruin the sense of community that has made the network so powerful, and that is something that would be very difficult — if not impossible — to recapture. So happy birthday, Twitter, and welcome to middle age.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Will Clayton

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• In Q3, Big Data Meant Big Dollars
• Facebook Remained Social Media’s Chief in Q3
• Report: NoSQL Databases – Providing Extreme Scale and Flexibility

Let’s face it: Today, success on the consumer Internet essentially equates with scale. Unless you have scale — which is nothing more than a nerdy euphemism for massive mainstream adoption — you don’t have much of a chance of becoming a major Internet company.

Our systems of monetization on the Internet all hark back to old media — television and print. The concept of audiences and cost-per-thousand impressions are the terminology used by media companies of yore. The other monetization models involve subscriptions, where people pay for a service or information, and what is known as e-commerce, where you buy goods such as books, clothes and shoes.

You need to be Internet scale to fit the current monetization models — advertising and subscriptions — and make meaningful revenues worthy of a large company.

So, What Works on the Internet?

In order to answer that question, I turned on the time machine of my mind and started thinking about successful (and not so successful) Internet companies, many of which have vanished under petabytes of history. If you look hard enough, it becomes clear that many successful consumer Internet services have three things in common that allows them to scale, get investor attention and, more importantly, bring in the much-needed revenues (and eventually profits).

Those things are:

1. They have a clear purpose.
2. They are simple to use.
3. They are fun to use or facilitate some type of entertainment or both

Now I don’t mean to suggest that you must have all three to be successful — but if you do, your chances of finding fame and fortune are much higher. Google, for instance had a clear sense of purpose (search/looking for information) and was simple enough to use (a search box on a white page, you don’t get simpler than that). As a result, it was able to become a $200 billion (in market capitalization) behemoth. Some might argue that finding the results one was looking for was “fun,” but I think that’s a bit of a stretch.

On that note, I don’t want to underscore the fact that these three elements aren’t the only reasons services become a hit. They have to be the right products at the right times. There is the undeniable element of luck, but the services also have to have that mysterious “it” factor, that something which makes millions of people go clicking.

Pop the Popcorn and Turn on Netflix

Now let’s look at a service that combines all three aspects: Netflix, which has seen its market capitalization go up 10 times over past 36 months.

1. It has a clear sense of purpose: Watch movies and television shows.
2. It is dead simple. You don’t need a manual to get started and start ordering DVDs or watching videos online. (Some might want a better Netflix experience. Well, I want to be 15 pounds lighter.)
3. It is all about “fun” or “entertainment.”

And since it isn’t ad-supported, the company has done the next best thing — priced it low enough that people don’t mind paying for the service every month, even though they may or may not tune in enough to justify spending the money. The low price point — $8 a month for the streaming-only option — is why people put up with the service’s limited access to the latest movies.

Yelp Needs No Help

Another company that has done a good job of combining the three aspects successfully is Yelp. The San Francisco-based company is valued at over $600 million and has 41 million users as of December 2010. Yelp offers reviews of everything from local eateries to maid services. It even has had its share of scandals.

It works because it has the three elements:

1. Clear purpose: to help you find inside information on a local restaurant, for example
2. Simple interface: look up a restaurant, peruse a list, then use the “star-rankings” to decide if you are interested.
3. Yelp is about finding fun and entertainment: going out, finding new places and if all fails, reading the comments which are always a source of amusement.

Being a bit of a big-city snob, I don’t much care about using Yelp, but many others do and use it obsessively. In fact, the company is so popular that Google wanted to buy it, and when that failed, it started trying to kill the service.

Yelp, however needs to scale, that is, have a lot of people use its service so it can keep generating page views, for it needs to show billions of banners to make millions of dollars in revenues. Same goes for other companies.

Like Yelp, Groupon is another company that has combined three elements and built what seems to be (at least for now) a scale business. It has a clear purpose (save you money via discounts), is simple to use (the offers are sent right to your inbox — even my mom can use it) and it’s fun. It has grown massively and is doing a big book of business.

Ditto for Skype, Facebook and several other services that blend these three elements and build enough scale to make money off their audiences. Interestingly, many of these companies found favor outside of Silicon Valley first before they became big in Palo Alto, Calif., so to speak.

Minus One, Hoping for a Home Run

One of the hotter companies on the web these days is Foursquare, the New York-based, location-based-services company. It’s certainly simple to use, and it’s fun to participate in. After all, who wouldn’t like to own the JetSetter badge.

Back in 2000, when the world was going to broadband, Google changed people’s behavior and found growth. I think Foursquare, like many of its peers, is at the right place at the right time, to tap into a the shift to anywhere computing. All it has to do is find its purpose.

It might have found it, though Dennis Crowley isn’t sharing it with us or anybody just yet. I can guess that Foursquare’s true purpose is to help discover new places and new things to do.

Digg Your Own Grave

Every time a service deviates from the magic formula, it tends to lose its way. Let’s take Digg as an example. Digg became popular because:

1. It had a clear purpose: Help find people interesting, mostly tech related content.
2. It was dead simple to use. You submitted a link, got folks to vote it up and eventually, if it was good enough, it hit the front page.
3. It was fun to use. You could discover interesting stories to read. It was even more fun to find your submissions on the front page. You got a sense of joy, which made the experience more addictive.

The company raised a lot of money, and it tried to justify its existence by diversifying into different verticals. Somewhere along the line, the service’s noble mission got hijacked by search engine optimization experts.

If that wasn’t enough, the company decided it needed a new direction. Digg management, displaying a complete lack of understanding of their own core value proposition, took a ham-fisted approach to redesigning the service. It was never meant to be social in a Twitter-sort of way. Instead, Digg had always been social in a group-hug sort of fashion.

Oops!

Now compare that with StumbleUpon, which not only survived eBay but is thriving, quietly, mostly because of its ability to focus on its core values — discovery of content in a simple and fun manner. (See Google Trends comparison chart, below. Red is for Digg and blue is for StumbleUpon.)

I don’t mean to pick on Digg, but it’s a visible example of what happens when companies lose their mission and deviate from the magic formula.

Somewhere in there is a lesson for Quora!

I will follow up with part two of this post, on the importance of connectedness and ubiquity, later this week.

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As a staffer describes in a blog post, a new “breaking news” module has been added to the site, which appears regardless of whether the user is looking at the My News, Top News or Upcoming view (My News — which shows links from people and sources you follow, Twitter-style — was added with the redesign, while Upcoming was removed, but has since been restored). The module is designed to highlight stories that the site’s editors feel are worth reading but haven’t made it to the front page yet.

More than anything else, this seems to be an admission by Digg that the site’s ranking algorithm — and/or the way that people are using the network — is no longer enough. The original idea behind Digg was that users would vote for the content they liked, and would inevitably drive the best or most interesting links to the front page, apart from the occasional experience with the “bury brigade” (which would gang up and vote down certain links). It was one of the first large-scale experiments in what some would call the “crowdsourced” aggregation of content.

Digg isn’t the first site to decide an algorithm isn’t enough to highlight all the best content that can be found online. Gabe Rivera, the founder of the technology link-aggregator Techmeme, added human editors to the site two years ago because he said the human element added something that even the best algorithm couldn’t. But Digg was different from a pure aggregator; it was effectively powered by humans from the beginning, and their votes theoretically determined the look of the site. That no longer seems to be working. But will human editors change how users look at Digg?

The bigger question, of course, is whether any of these changes can help the site recover from the traffic plunge it has suffered over the past year — a decline that has come in part as a result of the redesign, but also due to growing competition from other link-sharing networks such as Twitter and Facebook. These struggles have led some (including me) to wonder whether it’s relevant any more.

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Digg, which appeared to be stumbling after an ill-fated relaunch sparked a user revolt, now looks to be under siege. The former king of link-sharing services has seen two top-level executives — chief financial officer John Moffett and chief revenue officer Chas Edwards — leave the company in the past two days for jobs with other startups, and new CEO Matt Williams has slashed the workforce by more than a third, and says the company needs to “get back into startup mode.” But is such a thing even possible? Or is Digg on its way to the deadpool?

Not that long ago, Digg was a superstar in the world of “Web 2.0,” with its crowdsourced approach to news aggregation: a social-media twist on the Slashdot model. Websites large and small prayed for a link from the Digg homepage, and then trembled as their servers buckled under the load of millions of hits. Getting your site on Digg was a crucial step in getting popular attention even for mainstream publishers, and founder Kevin Rose wound up on the cover of BusinessWeek (with a photo he likely regrets) as the $60-million kid. Now, Digg is clearly in retreat — cutting staff, backpedaling on its heavily promoted, new features and watching its traffic decline.

How did it all go so wrong? Like plenty of other social networks — Friendster, Bebo and even MySpace — Digg just seemed to lose its mojo. Did it get complacent? Did Rose and former CEO Jay Adelson take their eye off the ball? Perhaps. Both got involved with Revision3, the Digg video spinoff, and Rose started to do some angel investing and other activities outside the company (one Hacker News commenter says the Digg founder “probably made more off of the sale of ngmoco than he would with Digg.”). Mostly, the service has simply been passed by, lapped by other competitors who have moved with the times and provided more features that users seem to want.

For many, Twitter has likely taken the place of Digg as a way of sharing interesting links. Others who wanted a community of users based on link-sharing have moved to Reddit, which some say has a more welcoming attitude. Reddit seemed to gain some significant momentum in the wake of Digg’s poorly received redesign and new features, in part because some Digg users hijacked the site’s front page and plastered it with Reddit links. As I pointed out in a recent GigaOM Pro report on Digg’s relaunch (subscription required), trying to appeal to new readers — as most of the site’s changes seemed designed to do — doesn’t accomplish much if you push away your core user base in the process.

Digg seems to have suffered from a certain hubris as well — the assumption that it had a comfortable lead over other services — and over-expanded. A number of observers have pointed out that despite getting as many, or more, pageviews as Digg, competitor Reddit has about 10 employees, compared with Digg’s 67 before the recent cuts and 42 after the layoffs (Reddit is also part of the Conde Nast empire, however, so it’s perhaps not a fair comparison). Should Digg have accepted one of the takeover offers it reportedly got from companies like Yahoo over the years? Possibly, although former CEO Jay Adelson says he doesn’t regret not selling the company, and suggests there weren’t as many firm offers as outsiders seem to think there were.

As Adelson notes, Digg isn’t on death’s door just yet; the site still has 20 million unique visitors a month, he says (although it may be less than that now). That’s a fairly large number, and the site’s revenues are reportedly in the $10-million range — but then, Yahoo has a huge user base too, and it’s widely seen as failing. New CEO Matt Williams says Digg is embarking on a new strategy of “engaging with users,” and is focusing on revenue-generating ventures such as Digg Ads. But those features depend on growing traffic and users, and Digg seems to no longer have either. Cutting costs may bring the company’s losses down, but you can’t cut your way back to popularity.

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Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user NightRPStar

Digg, the social-bookmarking service that has been struggling to right itself after an ill-fated relaunch earlier this year, is laying off more than a third of its remaining staff and has also lost a senior executive to another startup. New Digg CEO Matt Williams — who took over for founder Kevin Rose in late August, and spent his first few days apologizing for the problem-plagued and much-criticized launch of the site’s new features — said today in a blog post that the company has “a burn rate that is too high,” and that it must “significantly cut our expenses” in order to achieve profitability in 2011.

Williams’ comments come just a couple of months after Kevin Rose, who was then CEO, said in an interview with All Things Digital that the company was close to turning a profit and didn’t need to raise additional capital, because it had “double-digit millions” in revenue and had broken even on a monthly basis several times. In that interview, Rose also admitted that he didn’t really like being the CEO and that he realized the company had a “very small window to really get things right” because of the competition in the social networking market. In his blog post today, Williams said that Digg would be unveiling “a new strategy” for growth tomorrow.

Digg launched a new version of the site just a week before Williams was hired, after more than a year of design and testing. But the launch was widely criticized by loyal Digg users, and the company spent the subsequent weeks rolling back most of the changes that it had made and apologizing for the upheaval. Meanwhile, traffic at the site declined sharply — perhaps in part because critics started promoting competitor Reddit.com by posting links to the Digg home page — according to an analysis by Compete. Digg has been under pressure for the past year or more as Twitter and Facebook have stolen much of the momentum that the company initially had as a place for users to share links to interesting content.

It remains to be seen whether cutting staff by more than a third — less than six months after the company reportedly cut its headcount by 10 percent — will buy Digg enough breathing room to recover from its recent woes, or whether the new strategy that Williams mentioned can help it turn the corner.

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It’s hard not to feel sorry for new Digg CEO Matt Williams. The poor guy has only been on the job for a little over a month, after replacing founder Kevin Rose as chief executive in August, and his first major appearance is on a blog post in which he apologizes for all the flaws and missteps in the recent Digg redesign (none of which he was responsible for, of course) and promises to roll back the changes and restore almost all of the various features that die-hard Digg fans complained about losing. But can all of this apologizing bring back those frustrated users, or have they moved on for good?

Just to recap, Digg launched the new version of the site in late August. Almost immediately, there was a backlash from long-time Digg users. Many were concerned that too much content from mainstream media outlets was making its way to the site’s front page, instead of the quirky or off-beat content that Digg became famous for. They also criticized the removal of the so-called “bury” button, which users could click in order to vote a story off the site.

While he was still CEO, Rose wrote a blog post in which he agreed that some of the criticisms from users were well placed, and said the site would bring back certain features such as the “Upcoming” page, as well as allowing users to change the default view of the site to a list of most-voted for stories, rather than the new “My News” view, which featured links posted by a user’s friends and accounts they had chosen to subscribe to or “follow.” But the Digg founder remained adamant about some changes, including the removal of the bury button, which he said was necessary to “put a stop to the bury brigades” who would target content and try to get it removed by working as a group.

The new CEO, however, says in his blog post that the bury button is being restored, and that user profiles are also returning, along with better navigation for videos and images, a tool for users to report comment violations and an update to the front-page algorithm. Williams also admits that the launch “didn’t go smoothly” and that the company is “deeply sorry that we disappointed our Digg community in the process,” and thanks the site’s users for “your patience and your extremely candid feedback.” He notes in passing that Digg still has 23 million unique visitors a month, a comment that appears aimed at reports of plummeting traffic at the site since the redesign.

On the one hand, responding to criticisms from users is clearly a good thing for a site like Digg to do, since — as the new CEO points out — without that community the site is nothing, and without a loyal user base it isn’t going to be able to compete with other social tools such as Twitter and Facebook that have stolen a lot of its thunder. But what about the reasoning behind those changes? Rose argued that the disappearance of the bury button and other changes were necessary because “power” users of the site had too much influence, a view supported by some prominent Digg users such as former Engadget editor Ryan Block, who said that the redesign “realigns interests and does a lot to remove the incentives to game the system.”

As I argued in a GigaOM Pro piece after the backlash (subscription required), the upheaval at Digg shows just how difficult it is for a social network to change the way it functions on a fundamental level. Many of the changes were clearly designed to blunt the power of hard-core users and make the service more appealing to a broader range of users, but the revolt made it obvious that the changes had seriously alienated some of the site’s loyal fan base. This kind of strategy only works, however, if enough new users arrive to justify the loss of that traditional fan base. By apologizing for and unwinding most of its recent changes, Digg appears to be admitting that it backed the wrong horse.

Will simply restoring the site to the way it worked before be enough to pacify those irritated users — and more importantly, will backtracking so publicly make it even harder for Digg to change and evolve in the future?

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Digg has undergone a number of revisions and feature additions over the years, but nothing approaching the magnitude of the relaunch that took place recently, a comprehensive redesign and restructuring that had been in the works for over a year. The launch triggered a wave of dissent from Digg users that founder Kevin Rose — who recently stepped down as CEO in favor of former Amazon executive Matt Williams — continues to try and subdue.

Some see the revolt by hard-core users of the service as yet another sign of how fickle social-media users can be, or how poorly many people tolerate change. But there are two even more important points worth looking at: one is just how vital it is that user-driven services such as Digg communicate with their users when undertaking fundamental changes on the scale of this relaunch. And the second is that the Digg backlash has forced the company to confront the same critical question many other similar networks have struggled with, including Facebook — namely: how do you expand your reach and appeal to new users without irritating your existing fans and losing their support? I looked at some of the implications of these two points in a recent report I wrote for GigaOM Pro (sub req’d).

The negative reaction to Digg’s changes occurred in part because of the loss of some traditional features (such as the “bury” button, which users could click on to vote a post down) as well as some other irritations, like changes to the commenting system and the loss of the “thumbs up” and “thumbs down” icons. But those weren’t the only things that irritated die-hard Digg users — many were upset with what they saw as changes to the Digg ranking algorithm, and other new features for professional publishers (i.e., mainstream websites such as Mashable and those from Time Warner and other media companies), such as the ability to publish straight to the site via RSS feeds.

A number of users said that they felt these changes amounted to the site turning its back on its core user-base. From Digg’s point of view, however, most of these changes were deliberate — even necessary — in order to make the site more appealing to mainstream users, and reduce the influence that “power users” exerted through the bury button and other group-voting behavior. In a world where Twitter and Facebook are now the social-media tools of choice, Digg had to change, or risk becoming irrelevant.

Kevin Rose eventually responded on Twitter to some complaints, as well as in a blog post, saying many of the lost features would be restored and apologizing for bugs and other site problems. He also said the changes were designed in part to “remove the popularity contest and put the focus on quality diggers.” In other words, to try and defuse some of the influence that “power users” of the site had managed to accumulate. The biggest problem with Rose’s response, however, is that it only appeared after the revolt was well under way. For more analysis, please see the full report.

Cassandra was a tragic figure in Greek myth. She could hear the future and thus was able to foretell what was coming next (usually death and destruction). It’s no surprise that no one wanted her hanging around. It’s ironic that an open-source NoSQL software of the same name has often found itself amidst controversy. Today, Cassandra was blamed for scaling (and availability) problems at Digg, which led to the unconfirmed departure of Digg VP of Engineering John Quinn, who was a big champion of Cassandra at Digg.

This isn’t the first time Cassandra — which was created inside Facebook and later open-sourced — has taken a beating. Back in July, Twitter reversed its plans to move from MySQL to Cassandra for storing its tweets. Comments from Digg founder Kevin Rose as he tries to explain some problems on Digg’s new site aren’t helping Cassandra either. However, a call to Matt Pfeil, CEO of Riptano — an Austin, Texas-based startup — put thing in perspective. Riptano is building its business providing service and eventually an easy-to-implement version of Cassandra for companies (see my video interview with Pfeil here.) Pfeil said that Riptano is working with Digg and noted that he would be “shocked” if Digg abandoned Cassandra.

When asked if the problems Digg has had with its upgrade stemmed from Cassandra, Pfeil said, “We’ve reached out to Digg to ID what those problems are. I don’t know the full extent of them, and am learning more from them about their situation. We know Cassandra can scale to levels that are equal to or greater than a Digg is putting on it and I have full faith in Cassandra, but there are these little knobs that need to be tuned and you have to know where they are.”

For Pfeil, this could be an opportunity simply because helping find and turn “those little knobs” are what Riptano was formed to do. He said Riptano has been involved with Digg since around April, which was soon after Digg announced its plans to use Cassandra. While Digg may be able to blame Cassandra for some glitches, the database technology still seems to be on the upswing. Today, Quest — an enterprise software-database support company — decided to support Cassandra through a partnership with Riptano, and companies such as Cisco, Ooyala and Rackspace are also using it.

As Pfeil points out, Cassandra is still new, having been open-sourced in 2008. “Cassandra has come a long way, especially in the last year or so … there is a lot to be done before it is close to where it will compare in production environments to something like MySQL, but we’re getting close.” So maybe unlike the Greek prophetess, the database technology will be able to rehabilitate its reputation.

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Here’s a lightly edited transcript of our conversation:

GigaOM: V4 had been in development since before you joined the company nine months ago and you’d invited tons of beta testers. So why wasn’t it ready for primetime?

Keval Desai: You’re right, it had been around for some time — over a year. A critique was that Digg was slow in launching things, so we wanted to get to a platform that we could launch quickly on. So we went from a SQL database to NoSQL, and did a lot of other things in the stack using open source and other technologies.

This is a massive platform that serves millions of people, where if I’m following you, and you Digg a story, it immediately pops up for me, and if I have 10 followers it goes to them as well, and it’s an instant nuclear reaction. That’s a feature that I don’t think most Internet companies are trying to attempt. I think we’re trying to attempt something very innovative and it carries some technical risk.

As you know, we ran the product in beta for almost a couple of months, and it was running and in parallel to our existing platform. But the beta product was invitation-only, so we didn’t have full load until launch. At launch, we saw higher traffic than on Digg.com on the previous version — from renewed interest or people who had never heard of us who came for the first time. The second thing that happened is that the entire technical stack, some of which was fairly new, finally felt the brunt of the traffic, and saw some stress points that we didn’t see in our load-testing. But every day, the site gets more and more stable. We still have stability issues that I do want to acknowledge, but I think we are reacting. Since we launched, we’ve had more than 100 incremental launches — bug fixes, stability patches — and that speaks to the capability of the new platform.

GigaOM: Do you think Digg users would have revolted against anything you launched?

Desai: I wouldn’t call what happened a revolt. I think the worst thing that could have happened is that we launched a product and nobody noticed. I think what we’re from hearing users and power users is good feedback. On balance, they understand that Digg needs to have a scalable platform, it needs diversity of content, and people want a personalized view of news.

It’s a human tendency to react to something that’s new and that’s fine. What’s happening right now is par for the course except for the stability aspect. A lot of sites launch features every week, and with Digg we hadn’t launched in a while. This will become an incremental revolution.

GigaOM: What’s the distribution on Digg between readers, power users, and new users? How does your product team think about designing for such different experiences?

Desai: With any community site, whether it’s Wikipedia, Digg or Facebook, I think the typical distribution is you have a lot many more readers than writers. On a high level that’s clearly the case with Digg as well. But one interesting thing with V4 is the number of daily registered users has exploded. We’re seeing very high engagement in terms of people logging into the site, so that’s good. We think that bond of knowing who’re you’re following and who’s following you will get people to be more active.

In terms of who we’re designing this for, we want this to be a platform for users with a variety of interests, politics, sports, technology, lifestyle. Readers of all ages, of all nationalities. More than half of our traffic comes from outside the United States. Imagine if we can localize this product; we clearly have latent demand. The vision is to provide a news platform that serves a variety of needs as daily habit. The percentage of repeat users in the last week for V4 is quite high, much higher than we were seeing in V3. I don’t want to take anything for granted, but I think the early findings are quite clear.

GigaOM: Some changes you’ve made aren’t bug fixes or stability issues, but rather, bringing back features from V3 that you’d decided to take out. How do you make those decisions about relenting to user demands for old features (even though there may be more nostalgia around them than actual use — for instance, Kevin Rose said the Upcoming page had only 0.4% of views)?

Desai: In both the cases so far, Upcoming and giving users the choice to make top news default, these were things we wanted to add — but not on Day 1. What we wanted to do was get user reaction and react to it, rather than allowing feature creep to delay the launch of the platform.

GigaOM: Your bio on your Digg profile says “my job is to let the inmates run the asylum here and get out of their way.” What do you mean by that?

Desai: I think the philosophy behind that is when you’re at a job as a manager especially at entrepreneurial companies you need to be a coach rather than a micromanager. I want to hire the best and most brilliant people, then let them do what the came here to do: think of innovative ideas for millions of users, take some risks, launch, get feedback and react.

GigaOM: So the “inmates” are your coworkers, not the users?

Desai: Yes!

See also: New Digg CEO Must Grab the Reins and Go

Williams, according to a co-worker’s recommendation on LinkedIn, is “great at defining goals and processes and driving for measurable deliverables” and skilled at building teams. Those talents could certainly be useful for Digg, which launched a redesign last week that had been over a year in the making, and had been interrupted by layoffs and an executive shuffle in April when founder Kevin Rose bumped Jay Adelson out of the CEO spot.

Rose has since said publicly that he’d rather work on product than be CEO. (His actual words to All Things D were that the chief gig was “a pain in the a** that I would never wish on my worst enemy.” Astonishingly, that recruiting job worked on Williams!) On the other hand, Williams’ background seems to be more in serving merchants than consumers, which is something Digg is being accused of doing now: giving preference to publishers over regular Joe users. Williams also doesn’t seem to be terribly active in social media himself; I can’t find an actively used Digg or Twitter profile for him.

Rose noted in a blog post that Williams had been involved in “Amazon’s community efforts” earlier in his carrier and said that Williams would handle the “day-to-day business” while Rose will “remain actively involved in the product.” Williams said he believed in “the potential of this new platform” and that “There is so much innovation yet to come.”

The Digg redesign (known as V4) had trouble getting out the door, is buggy, and has been panned and mocked by Digg users, especially long-time devotees of the site. Digg is racing to respond with fixes, including adding some old features back to the new version. Still, you can’t fault Digg for trying to do something bold, after languishing while sites like Twitter and Facebook became better ways for many users to stay abreast of the news through links shared by friends. Rose said in the All Things D interview he looks at the next four to six months as a small window for Digg to show itself — and investors — that the company can do something different and make it work. Now it’s up to you, Mr. Williams!

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