Is The New Digg Just a Prettier, Faster Twitter?

Yesterday I posted some of my comments about the new Digg site along with a video from several of the top digg users (aka power diggers).  I took some time out of my coding session to take a deeper look at the new Digg. What I found is that many of the elements of the new Digg mirror those on Twitter (and to a lesser extent Facebook). I can say that Digg loads much faster than Twitter and is a lot more polished on the user interface side (something Twitter really needs to fix).

Interestingly, when I visit both Mashable and NextWeb today, both are pushing huge banners to get their readers to follow them on Digg. This follows the same pattern as with the launches of Google Buzz and, earlier, Twitter. Both publishers are defaults on the new Digg and my guess is that we will see continued pumpage (from a good number of publishers) as long as Digg provides the same traffic burst as they did previously. Since these publishers are defaults for new users, they should see an even larger increase in traffic as more of their stories reach (and dominate) the home page (see below for more on this topic).

Let’s take a look at some of the core concepts on Twitter and the new Digg to see where the similarities exist.

Following/Followers

This is the core concept of Twiter – after you setup an account, you can choose to follow people/brands/bots and other people/brands/bots can choose to follow you as well. Digg is using the same verbiage in their newly-released service.

Suggested User Lists (what I call “Default Users”)

When someone writes the book about how Twitter rose to fame, the book can be written in two words (way less than 140 characters). Those two words are Default Users. It was a brilliant move by Twitter (I’m serious). By pimping a select group of users on the new service, it allowed new users to start with content on their page. It also allowed a group of people and blogs to generate massive numbers of followers which resulted in huge traffic and big cash money deals. (we can argue about whether the number of followers equals influence another day) And those traffic numbers helped get the media conversation about Twitter going.

When Twitter launched their default user list, many of the users who helped build the service and were heavy users of the service were left off the list. The same elements make up the Digg suggested user list.

Some fun and interesting notes about the suggested user list on Digg:

• Being active on Digg means nothing as nearly every default user is just auto-publishing with no comments or non-site diggs
• Mashable has 7 feeds as defaults
• Techcrunch isn’t listed as a top default but writer MG Sigler is (might actually be better this way for potential traffic) – Techcrunch is listed as a default in the Tech category. They did add the Digg widget to the blog today so perhaps that might help get them to the top default page?
• iJustine gets a top slot without any community participation – guess she brought Kevin Rose some cupcakes?
• Leo Laporte is listed 3rd – right behind founder Kevin Rose and the Telegraph newspaper. I thought Leo quit social media last week?

Update: within 10 hours of my posting, Techcrunch is now listed as a top default user – that didn’t take long!

This afternoon CEO Kevin Rose has addressed several issues regarding the new site. Regarding the default list, he notes, “Our directory of recommended users will eventually open to the entire world. We will sort users, not on popularity (followers), but based on how good you are at finding/digging content (similar to wefollow.com). This will remove the popularity contest and put the focus on quality diggers.” If he follows the Twitter pattern, he will keep the current list long enough to allow the publishers and friends to get enough followers that changing the list will have no effect whatsoever (just like on Twitter). I am afraid his plan may backfire and hope he considers this issue before it gets too big to fix.

Scraped Feeds

No, no, I’m not talking about the Scraper® here. I am talking about how 99.9% of publishers post links to all of their stories on Twitter. And now Digg allows publishers to do the same thing. On Digg this is called the, “RSS-Fed Autosubmit”. My guess is Digg wasn’t seeing enough content published per day so this option should increase the traffic on Digg. On the top digger podcast, the publishing of entire feeds was probably the biggest topic of discussion. Everyone on the call said they were against this and I agree. I think it’s fine on Twitter but not on Digg. But don’t look for any of the default sites to remove their feeds anytime soon as the traffic burst will be too great to even consider removing the auto submissions (I can’t blame them).

Here’s an example of the auto-submissions on both Twitter and Facebook using the blog Mashable (a default user on both services):

One of the gripes top digger Muhammed Saleem was concerned about is the ability to get “non-mainstream” news any visibility on the new Digg. If we take a look at the popular top news technology section, here’s the breakdown of the 15 top stories by publisher (I left out the in-stream ad):

• Wired – 3
• Mashable – 3
• Ars Technica – 3
• Engadget – 3
• Twit – 2
• Nextweb – 1

For reference, all of these sites are default/suggested publishers. And all of these publishers are auto-publishing all stories to Digg. As these publishers add more followers from their Digg freebies, the percentage of their stories that hit the homepage will go up while any other publishers and/or users will be drowned out. I wonder if CEO Kevin Rose considered this issue. Maybe Muhammed is right…

Diggs vs. Retweets

Digg allows you to vote for stories you like — Twitter lets you retweet stories you like. If a story gets enough votes on Digg, it moves to the homepage. If a story gets enough retweets it moves to a “Top Tweet” and could become a trending topic.

Ads

Digg runs banner ads and instream ads. Twitter runs sponsored topics and third-party services put ads in streams.

Conclusion

I can’t blame Digg for many of the changes they’ve made in this new version of the service. It has a much more “mainstream” feel to it and while a lot of heavy users will be mad, as long as Digg gets traffic inbound from Google (though Andy says they need to fix the SEO) and can send traffic to publishers, Digg should come out ahead. I’m not sure a less group of less radical changes would have potentially helped Digg as much as the current set of changes can.

So, is the new Digg really just Twitter plus comments? If I already grab the feeds of the default users on Digg in my Twitter stream, why would I need to visit Digg at all? What am I missing here? I sure hope I am missing something in my analysis as I used to spend a good deal of time on the site and would be open to spending time there again.