Digg Review

Reviewed on August 7, 2006

Overview from the Digg Web site

Digg offers the following overview on their web site (www.digg.com):

Digg is all about user powered content. Every article on digg is submitted and voted on by the digg community. Share, discover, bookmark, and promote the news that's important to you!

First Impressions

Digg, by all accounts, is the largest of the social networking web sites. They are the cover story for Business Week for the week of August 14, 2006. The basic idea for the Digg site is that when you find an interesting story or web page, you "Digg-it" and let others know about it.

Signup

Creating an account on Digg was quick and painless. One function I really liked is the ability to check a proposed username without form submission. As Digg grows, finding an available username will become more difficult and this makes it easier. It would be nice to see a list of alternatives if my first selection is taken. There is a small error in their validation: when submitting a blank e-mail, I received the following error message, "That email is already in use under another username." This message should ask me to enter an e-mail address.

Usability

Using the Digg service is easy. You click on "Submit a News Story" and follow the simple instructions. They ask you to search first to verify that the story has not been Dugg already. Then you, and others, can "digg" or "undigg" the story. As more people digg the story, the closer it moves to the front page. It can take hours to try to catch up with the thousands of stories being posted. I found it best to use the simple category system they offer to hone in on my desired topics. Clicking a story link will open a new browser window with the selected story. I like that the story opens in the actual location rather than reading it within the Digg context.

Other site features

• Digg offers a new option, "digg spy". This allows you to watch digg's in real time. I can only imagine people sitting in front of their screen for hours watching these new headlines appear. Kind of like crapping away on IRC.

What would I like to see added in future releases

I would like to see more categories added. For some reason Apple has it's own category, it would be great to see other companies added as categories as well (i.e. Google, Yahoo, Microsoft). I would request the ability to create a feed that has the categories I want. This would make the tool even more useful.

Top Competitors

• del.icio.us
• reddit (read review)

Summary

In summary, Digg is the leader and their functionality supports the leadership claim. With thousands of stories being submitted each day, a taxonomy will be crucial to their continued success. While they have a good base of categories, this list will need to grow and also become smarter to the user's needs for expansion. I Dugg the site!