By adding new features and attempting to make Facebook a one stop
internet shop, as well as aggressive outreach in new territories like
Korea and Russia, Mark Zuckerberg certainly seems confident that FB can
double its existing user base.

Given Facebook’s huge marketing and
financial clout, it’s increasingly likely he might be right…

One Billion Users.

That’s a significant portion of..well..everyone. And Facebook has been making plans to add them all to its network.

Is it possible? If it chooses the right marketing methods, then it’s inevitable.

The data Facebook collects is by far its most valuable commercial asset. From a commercial point of view, the  value of highly targeted ad revenue from a billion users would be almost incalculable (although I’m sure businesses will figure it out pretty quickly), so maybe it’s time Facebook decided to stop worrying people with privacy issues and instead reward some of its customers for their information?

Obviously a straightforward cash kickback is probably off the cards straight away.The sheer logistics involved in giving a fiver to a billion people would make it a hugely unwieldy enterprise, albeit one that might turn out to be a bargain for the company, but let’s face it, Facebook doesn’t have a particularly altruistic history.

However, there are plenty of other incentives the company and those using it as an advertising platform could use to incentivize customers and reward them for adding extra information to their profiles.

Group buying.

Companies like Groupon and LivingSocial have already had success by harnessing bulk buying power and passing it on to members and it’s a fair bet they don’t currently have 500m people backing them up. Even allowing for diversity and differing economic status, Facebook still has the leverage to offer its users some amazing deals:

In Game rewards

Love them or hate them, there’s no denying the massive popularity of the many online games Facebook hosts. By offering in game rewards (profile 80% complete? Have a handy upgrade to your weapons/herd of pigs/dance moves) they’d be harnessing the power of one of the most committed groups online : gamers.

Advance notice

Got a big promotion coming up? Wouldn’t it be nice if Facebook let your target users know about it in advance? Maybe they’d like to submit extra information in return for getting the jump on your latest deals? The big plus is that both you and Facebook get that extra demographic information, meaning you can tweak those campaigns for better results.

Referral awards.

Invited your email address book to join up or referred them to a group? Well how about a little kickback in exchange? Again, this would be more likely to take the form of online points rather than cash, but for companies it could easily be paid for in PPC freebies from Facebook, incentivizing brand marketers to engage their audience for Facebook’s benefit as well as their own.

Facebook is already the largest network and it still sees consistent growth. If it’s really going for the big numbers, then it makes perfect sense for the company to increasingly utilize its corporate users as expansion hubs.

Apart from the free signup the thought of giving things away may be anathema right now but given the right impetus it could be worth a lot of customer sentiment and advertising revenue and for better or worse give them the web domination they crave.

Last week, popular reviews site Yelp announced that it had teamed up
with OpenTable to offer Yelp users the ability to book restaurant
reservations through OpenTable directly on the Yelp site.

A Yelp-OpenTable relationship is one that some have speculated about
for some time now, and given that 29% of the businesses reviewed on
Yelp are restaurants, the integration between the two services seems like a no-brainer.

According to TechCrunch, Yelp’s integration with OpenTable comes as part of OpenTable’s affiliate program. That’s an important point, as Yelp has had a somewhat difficult time translating the massive popularity of user reviews into massive profit. A big reason for that: as I’ve pointed out before, it’s tough to provide an open forum for individuals to voice their opinions about businesses while at the same time trying to build commercial relationships with those very same businesses.

Recently, Yelp has been the target of class action lawsuits alleging that Yelp has tried to ‘extort‘ business owners into purchasing advertising. With this as a backdrop, becoming an OpenTable affiliate seems like it might be a less troublesome way to monetize without trying to deal with restaurant owners directly. That said, the relationship with OpenTable raises a couple of interesting issues:

• As an OpenTable affiliate, Yelp has a clear financial stake in encouraging its users to book reservations through OpenTable. Logically, Yelp users are going to be less inclined to book with restaurants that have negative reviews and while I’m certainly not suggesting that Yelp will censor out negative reviews left for restaurants that work with OpenTable, it seems that Yelp’s critics could raise the question of potential conflict.
• It is not clear whether restaurants working with OpenTable are informed that a reservation was made through Yelp. If this is the case or ever becomes the case, some OpenTable restaurants would ostensibly have an advantage over non-OpenTable restaurants in that they could go well beyond the call of duty in serving Yelp users in order to promote positive reviews and avoid bad ones. Obviously, that might be a smart move for the restaurant but it would potentially result in reviews on Yelp that are not representative of the typical dining experience.

Needless to say, potential and perceived conflicts (and hypotheticals) don’t necessarily translate into real-world problems and personally, I think the Yelp-OpenTable relationship is a sensible one. But the broader battle between generating revenue and maintaining credibility is always going to be a tough one for user reviews sites like Yelp. There’s a fine line to walk, and given the affiliate relationship, Yelp and OpenTable would be wise to avoid too much PDA when dining in public.

Photo credit: madmolecule via Flickr.

With 2010 started, the new decade has begun. But how did we get to here?

In this article, we’re going to look at the major events from each year in the past decade that have helped develop the web design industry. Try keeping a tab on how many affected you, I bet you’ll run out of fingers quite quickly!

2000

The decade started off poorly for web industries. In the previous 2 or 3 years, the Dot-Com Bubble was a time of rapid growth for companies moving to trade online. In 2000, the bubble burst and many web companies went bust.

One success story from the middle of all this was a simple bulletin board project. The open-source phpBB system was first made publicly available in July, and today is the most popular free forums system around.

2001

b2, a primitive blogging system was created under the GPL. If you have a look at its first ever post, you’ll find it’s still characteristic of the default post in its successor; WordPress.

In May, the W3C propose the first Working Draft for CSS 3. The first work on CSS3 was started in 1998, and over a decade on, it’s still a work in progress.

In August, what would arguably be the most hated piece of software in the decade was released; Internet Explorer 6. At least now, we can start to say goodbye.

2002

Jonathan Abrams founded Friendster in 2002. This popular social networking site was to be the forerunner of countless similar sites, including MySpace and Facebook.

The RSS 2.0 specification was released in September. This format (And the later spin-off, Atom) allowed content to be shared independent of formatting, and for it to be manipulated in any way the user chose.

2003

During 2003, David Heinemeier began work on Ruby on Rails. This open-source webapp framework has grown to massive popularity and the PHP vs. Ruby on Rails debate is a famous one now.

Two years on from the creation of b2 and things weren’t going too well; the core developer had vanished and updates were non-existent. Enter Matt Mullenweg with his thoughts on forking the development, and WordPress was born.

In June, Jeffrey Zeldman published Designing With Web Standards (Now in its 3rd Edition). This book helped shape the web design industry by providing a compelling justification for companies to work with standards based coding.

  A List Apart regularly publishes some of the best articles around. One example of this came in 2003 when Patrick Griffiths published his Suckerfish Dropdowns article on creating a light-weight, standards-compliant, accessible dropdown. In a time of DHTML, this was a godsend, and was later followed up by Sons of Suckerfish.

In August, several eUniverse employees (including the world-famous Tom) got together and set up a Friendster-inspired website; MySpace. eUniverse’s massive userbase would give this site the headstart in the early years, but its future adversary wouldn’t be long in coming.

In October, a lonely student at Harvard set up Facemash, a site for comparing pictures of 2 other students to see who looked better. Although quickly closed down, it would be the forerunner for what happened next…

2004

In January, our not-so-lonely student took the next step and created Facebook, which Alexa today ranks as the number 2 site in the world.

Also in the beginning of 2004, 37Signals released Basecamp, a project management tool. 37Signals and their products have since become the poster child for simple design (Not to mention an online success story!)

On April Fool’s Day, Google is well-known for taking part in the jokes over the years. In 2004’s April Fool’s, they announced a free mail service with 1GB of storage. Obviously a joke, Hotmail only gave 2MB…

And on a related note, Gmail was the first example of AJAX being used in a major application. Since then, it’s been used in countless other websites.

Towards the end of the year, Version 1.0 of the “Phoenix Project” was released. By this point though, it had been renamed to the much more familiar, Firefox.

2005

In April, Mike Industries released sIFR, a technique for bringing richer typography to the web via Flash.

Also in April, Adobe acquired Macromedia for a massive $3.4 billion. Industry standard tools like Fireworks, Dreamweaver and Flash would now be incorporated into the Adobe Creative Suites.

In October, Safari became the first browser to pass the Acid2 test. The Acid tests were developed to test browser support for web standards and to help encourage all browsers to use the same standards.

The first ever An Event Apart kicked off in Philadelphia in December. One of the top design conferences in the industry, there have been 17 more events since, with 4 more planned for 2010.

2006

In January, Opera Mini received a worldwide release. It was created for mobile browsing and claims to be the world’s most popular mobile browser.

Also in January, JQuery was released at Barcamp NYC by John Resig. Since then it has become the most popular JavaScript library in use today.

Come February, Yahoo launched YUI2, a framework for making webapp development easier. YUI3 was released in September 2009, but version 2 still enjoys massive popularity.

In March, Jack Dorsey published the first ever Tweet. Approaching the end of the decade, the “twttr project” has finally reached profitability (with vowels included).

In October, Google purchased Youtube for $1.65 billion. That story has inspired countless other web startups.

Microsoft FrontPage was first released in 1997 and aside from horrendous table-based layouts with flashing marquees, the FrontPage Extensions necessary to use features of it on web servers were a nightmare. In December 2006, Microsoft discontinued the product.

2007

By 2007, MovableType, a proprietary competitor to WordPress, was being left behind as WordPress’ community grew and grew. To help grow their own community, they released a GPL version of MovableType, but still much more restricted than WordPress.

In early June 2007, Adobe released Adobe AIR. This runtime environment allowed developers to create desktop apps using web technologies like AJAX and Flash, to run on any platform (Windows, Mac, Linux).

And of course, in June 2007 Steve Jobs presented a rather interesting keynote. An iPhone, you say?

In November, Amazon launched a new book reader, the Kindle. As web developers, we’re used to our content being available on different mediums, so the Kindle and other eBook readers are an interesting development to watch.

2008

In March, the 960 Grid System was released by Nathan Smith. This CSS framework was designed to let you quickly mock-up web layouts using only HTML.

Since Firefox’s original release in 2004, it had been steadily gaining popularity. A single day in June was to showcase this; on the 17th June, ‘Download Day’, Firefox 3 set a world record by being downloaded over 8 million times in 24 hours.

The iPhone had been released for just one year now and already had a massive following. With the release of the app store in July, the iPhone’s future dominance was all but guaranteed.

In the Autumn, the HTC Dream became the first available phone running Google’s Android operating system. Trumped up as an iPhone killer, HTC and other Android phones may not have lived up to that name, but it has certainly gained a massive market share.

In December, Google Chrome became publicly available. This web browser is based on WebKit but optimized to put speed first, and with a minimal interface for the user.

2009

BuddyPress, the WordPress MU-based social network extension was first released in April. It has had strong development even in the short time since then and now packs a lot of features.

In June, Microsoft’s Bing officially went live. Microsoft’s presence in the search industry had been steadily on the downfall, but since Bing and its massive marketing campaign, it has at last seen some growth.

Also in June, Less CSS was released by Alexis Sellier and Dmitry Fadeyev. It let’s you write CSS code with variables, operations and nested rules, then compile it into regular old CSS.

In July, the W3C confirmed that when the XHTML 2 team’s working charter expired at the end of the year, it would not be renewed. This allows more resource to go towards the development of HTML 5.

In October, Yahoo provided a somewhat fitting end to the decade with the closure of Geocities. Geocities was a lot of people’s first taste of publishing to the internet. Web publishing has come a long, long way since the days of Geocities’ glory in the late 90s.

End of the Noughties

So much has happened in the past 10 years. I doubt anyone in 1999 could have predicted where we would be now. It has to make you wonder where we’ll be come 2020!

If you had to choose one single event that affected the web design industry the most, what would it be?

For me, the web standards movement (Embodied in things like Jeffrey Zeldman’s book, the CSS Zen Garden and many other standards supporters) has had the most profound effect. Curious to hear what your choices will be!

It’s one of the unofficial poster children of Web 2.0, and was one of the first social news sites to come out.

It gets millions of visitors every month (Compete says about 43 million in October 2009), and those visitors vote on thousands of stories every day.

In this article you can learn about how Digg came to be from its humble beginnings to the massive popularity it has now as well as the controversies that have surrounded it.

In case you’re unfamiliar with how Digg works, here’s a very brief overview:

Users can submit stories from anywhere online, giving each submission a headline and synopsis to help other Digg users determine if a story is worth their time.

After a story is submitted, other users can “Digg” (vote up) or “Bury” (vote down) that story. If a story gets a certain number of Diggs within a specified period of time, it might make the popular section within its category or even the home page.

If it gets buried enough times, it will disappear from the site’s main feed (and is only visible if users specifically include buried stories in their searches).

The exact algorithm that determines whether a story makes the popular sections or gets buried is kept a secret, and has been changed and refined numerous times throughout Digg’s history.

Early Development

Digg got started in late 2004 as an experiment by Kevin Rose, Jay Adelson, Ron Gorodetzky and Owen Byrne.

The name “Diggnation” was originally proposed, but the group decided the name was too long, and shortened it to “Digg” (Dig.com had already been registered by the Walt Disney Internet Group, hence the double “G”).

Digg was similar to social bookmarking sites, but had one fundamental difference. While sites like Delicious allowed users to bookmark sites and share them with others, they were aimed at saving sites you’d want to return to again and again.

Digg, on the other hand, focused on saving pages with temporary value: things like news stories and blog posts. Digg was the first true social news site.

The first ten stories on Digg were primarily tech-focused (Blog Box Applications, a CSS cheatsheet, and a torrent search engine were among them), though there was also a post about a buy-one-get-one-free deal at Jamba Juice. The tenth story seems to have disappeared; it’s been speculated it was a spam post and was removed.

Within 18 months, Digg grew to more than 800,000 daily visitors. But they’d also started receiving some negative attention during that time. One early allegation of abuse was over Digg users using the site to spread rumors of a Google acquisition of Sun, which led to artificial inflation of Sun’s stock prices.

Initial Development

The initial site launched didn’t have support for many of the things we associate with Digg today. Basically, the original Digg let users sign up for an account, submit content, and then either vote it up (Digg it) or vote it down (Bury it).

According to an interview with Mother Jones in 2007, Kevin Rose worried for the first six months or so about the content that would make it to the home page.

It was the first time a site had allowed users to become editors and determine which content was likely to be seen. But it ultimately turned out a success, with most of the content on the front page during those first few months being interesting, relevant news.

Digg 2.0
The second iteration of Digg added many of the features we associate with the site today.

It was launched in July of 2005, only about 8 months after the original site was launched. The ability to add friends was included, as well as a site redesign. They also removed the redirect to a “success” page after users dugg a story.

Digg 3.0
Roughly one year after Digg 2.0 was released, Digg 3.0 came out.

The new version included specific categories for Entertainment, Gaming, Videos, World & Business, Science, and Technology, along with an option to view all the categories at once.

Diggnation

Diggnation is the weekly video podcast show Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht produce.

Its primary focus is to talk about some of Digg’s top stories for the week among other things. The show airs online every Wednesday at 6PM.

There are an estimated 200,000 regular subscribers to the show. In addition the website distribution, the show is also available through iTunes and TiVo, and is available on-demand on Virgin America airlines.

Diggnation has received a number of awards, including the 2006 Podcast Award for best technology podcast, the Best in 2007 Podcast from iTunes, and a Webby Award in 2008 for People’s Voice Winner for the Technology in Online Film and Video.

Diggnation is produced by Revision3, which was founded by Jay Adelson, Kevin Rose, Dan Huard, Ron Gorodetzky, and David Prager and is now led by Jim Louderback. Diggnation was their first show, but they’ve grown to include more than a dozen other shows.

Advertising and Revenue

The original Digg site didn’t include any advertising. But as the site grew, the developers quickly added means of generating revenue.

They started out with Google AdSense, and eventually moved on to banner ads. But in the summer of 2009, the moved on to a different form of advertising: sponsored posts showing up within Digg’s regular news feed.

What really set this apart, though, was that these sponsored posts also included “Digg” and “Bury” buttons, like their regular content.

This was a pretty revolutionary new form of advertising. It allows users to vote up or down the ads they want to see, and according to a quote in the Bits blog of the New York Times from Mike Maser, Digg’s chief strategy officer, the response from users has been largely positive.

Considering the history Digg has had with user reactions to changes they’ve made, implementing this kind of advertising strategy was risky to say the least. But so far it looks like it’s paid off—Digg has tripled their ad revenue forecast for the year.

It’s also providing valuable feedback to companies running ads, as they can see exactly what Digg users think of their ads based on how they’re voted up or down. This means future marketing efforts can be better targeted toward the site’s visitors.

The Digg Effect

Digg has grown to such large visitor numbers that websites who make the front page often have a hard time staying up under the onslaught of traffic (if they’re unprepared for it, that is).

This is known as the “Digg effect”, though sometimes this is a result of the story being featured on multiple bookmarking and news sites simultaneously.

The Digg effect can send thousands or tens of thousands of visitors to a site within a matter of a couple hours, and has been known to crash sites on a fairly regular basis.

Numerous articles have been written (here, here, and here for starters) about the Digg Effect, what it really does, and how to prepare for it so your site doesn’t slow down too much or crash.

Controversies Surrounding Digg

Digg has been surrounded in controversy practically since its launch.

Everything from the “bury” option to the fact that it’s a user-moderated site have come under fire from critics.

One of the most common criticisms regards Digg’s algorithm (and changes to it). Digg has always kept its algorithm a secret, which has led many to believe that Digg’s creators often have a hand in censoring or burying particular posts they don’t agree with (or, alternatively, of bumping posts they particularly like).

Digg has always maintained that whether the content makes the front page or is buried is entirely up to the users, and that the developers and programmers have no hand in it.

Other controversies include the use of Digg as a marketing tool by entrepreneurs. While some companies become legitimate parts of the Digg community, others do little more than submit self-promotional posts in hopes of getting extra traffic (those posts are generally either buried directly or just never gain any traction).

Here are a few more controversies surrounding Digg:

Digg Revolt

So far, there have been two major Digg uprisings, one in 2007 and one in 2008.

The first one, in May 2007, revolved around the AACS encryption key used on HD DVDs and Blu-ray Disc.

On May 1, an article made it to Digg’s front page that offered up the encryption key for removing the digital rights management on HD DVDs and Blu-ray Discs.

Digg’s legal team recommended the story be taken down. Digg did so, and banned a number of users who had submitted the story.

But Digg users didn’t take this action lightly. Rather than let the issue drop, more and more Digg users started reposting the encryption key, both in comments and new posts.

Soon there were hundreds of stories appearing on the site, and Digg backed down. Digg’s official statement declared, “…you’ve made it clear. You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company.”

They reversed their policy of deleting posts that included the encryption key and said they would deal with whatever consequences that brought.

The second major revolt happened when a change to Digg’s algorithm was announced. Many Digg “power users” felt the new algorithm would give them less power in influencing the content that made it to the front page.

A temporary boycott was called, with some even proposing the users move over to a different site entirely. Digg was also called out for being unresponsive to suggestions posed by users, and a general lack of communication.

Numerous other grievances were cited in letters to Digg, including a lack of transparency and Digg’s purported “auto-bury” list.

Before the revolt, Digg put up a blog post explaining that the changes were being made to create a more level playing field for all Digg users, and to give everyone a fair chance of having their submission make the front page.

Digg Bar

The Digg Bar was released in early April 2009 and immediately came under fire for multiple reasons.

The Digg Bar, for those unfamiliar with it, frames the original webpage rather than redirecting to the page specifically.

One major reason this has been criticized is that it can have a negative effect on a site’s page rank, because the shortened URLs the bar uses don’t give any credit to the original site (some CMSs and blogs have blocked the Digg bar or set it to redirect to the original page).

ForeverGeek-Gate

In April 2006, ForeverGeek called Digg out on a pattern of digging by what has been deemed the “Digg Army“.

Basically, he noticed a pattern of digging by certain users, and that some stories that made the home page had been dugg by a number of the exact same Diggers.

In fact, of the two stories he compared, both were from A List Apart, and were originally submitted by the same user. Of the first 24 users who dugg the story, 22 of them were the same (the first 16 were completely identical, right down to the order in which they dugg the stories).

Only two users were different on each story. Adding to the speculation surrounding this was the fact that Kevin Rose was included in the 22 users who dugg both stories.

A number of high-profile blogs (including BoingBoing and Slashdot) reported ForeverGeek’s findings, many of which verified the claims.

And some more traditional media sources also weighed in (including The Inquirer). And not long after that, ForeverGeek was banned from Digg (it became impossible to submit any stories from the site).

While Digg maintains that ForeverGeek was banned because they were suspected of using multiple accounts to vote up their own stories, there are a number of reports of other users who submitted similar stories who were also banned.

Eventually, ForeverGeek was un-banned. But reportedly a number of users in the “Digg Army” disappeared from the site, too.

The Bury Brigade

It has long been theorized that there is a network of Diggers who act as a unofficial censors to content posted to Digg that does not fit with their ideology. This network is often referred to as the “Bury Brigade”.

In early 2007, a user named David LeMieux figured out how to use the site’s Digg Spy tool to highlight which users were burying stories and why they were doing so. He was able to gather information on more than 1700 buries during a two hour period.

Digg has long kept information about buries shrouded in secrecy, so the data gathered by LeMieux is some of the only such data available. The story itself was then buried on Digg, and one user who submitted a duplicate story even found themselves banned.

Another user, Muhammad Saleem, posted some raw data and his analysis on the Bury Brigade in February 2007. He came to the conclusion that it proved the existence of a Bury Brigade, though other users doubted that conclusion (see the comments to the original article for specifics).

Both the Bury Brigade and the users trying to uncover the truth behind it seem to be grassroots-based and have no central leader or formal organization.

The Bury Brigade gained enough attention there was an official response from Kevin Rose posted on the Digg blog regarding the information released about it.

Basically, Rose stated that the data gathered through using the Digg Spy was only partial data, and shouldn’t be considered representative of what’s happening across the entire Digg community.

Whether a bury brigade actually exists or whether the stories purportedly buried by them are just a reflection of the bias of the majority of Digg users (or just the most involved) is still up in the air.

The Top User List

Up until 2007, Digg had a public list of who the top Diggers were. These were the most influential Digg users.

Stories they submitted and dugg got to the front page more often than those by other users. These top users enjoyed a position of power within the Digg community. So much so, in fact, that some were offered monetary or other compensation for digging sponsored stories.

And that’s where the controversy started. If powerful Digg users were being paid to digg stories, it would change the dynamics of the entire site.

If a sponsor paid ten or twenty of the top users to vote for a story, it could spur other users to vote for it, and the likelihood of it making the front page would drastically increase. The whole thing was at odds with what the Digg community was supposed to be all about (democratic, user control of content).

Those on the list were also accused of manipulating Digg content, paid or otherwise. So, Digg took action. They stopped publishing the list of top Digg users.

This resulted in outrage from some Digg users (mostly those who appeared on the Top Diggers list), who enjoyed the notoriety they gained from being on the list.

Some viewed it as removing any reward for submitting content, and speculated it could lead to decreased participation among some members. Whether the removal of the list had any lasting impact on Digg is unknown (it didn’t appear to).

The Existence of Auto-Bury

There has been ongoing speculation over the existence of an auto-bury algorithm or an internal bury system.

A few bloggers have published anecdotal evidence of some kind of internal bury mechanism, though Digg has maintained that there is no such system.

While some of the evidence against Digg seems pretty compelling, there’s nothing that proves the existence of any kind of auto-bury system. And since Digg’s algorithm is a closely-gaurded secret, it’s unlikely we’ll find out the truth behind this any time soon.

A Brief History of Digg Controversy has more information about controversies surrounding Digg.

Digg Events

Digg founders regularly participate in tech-related events and host Digg meetups.

In 2008 they hosted the Bigg Digg Shindigg at SXSW. Their first meetup was held in San Francisco in 2008, and other meetups have followed in Chicago, Los Angeles, Seattle and New York.

They hosted a second Bigg Digg Shindigg at SXSW in 2009 that included a live Diggnation show and live music. It was attended by more than 2000 people.

In addition to live events, Digg also hosts online townhall-style meetings. They’ve held seven to date (you can watch all of them on their website).

These townhall webcasts are hosted by Jay Adelson and Kevin Rose, and included information on new features, answers to questions posed by community members, and site-related news.

The Future of Digg

Digg has reportedly been trying to sell itself for a number of years now, and was even courted by Google at one point (the sale fell through at the last minute). Kevin Rose was quoted in an interview in Mother Jones saying that he’d be happy to continue running Digg without being sold or going public.

A survey leaked in September 2009 gave some hints about the possible future direction of Digg.

It sought user input on things like a customized homepage that shows popular stories that might appeal to specific users based on their interests and vertical channels that would let users discover popular content in specific niche areas.

Other features mentioned included anonymous Digging (without requiring a user account), a “save to read later” function that lets you flag stories to look at later, and Digg groups that let users form groups to share content.

One of the more interesting features mentioned is a “Digg Breaking News” section, which could be targeted at taking some of Twitter’s market share when it comes to breaking news (which Twitter has become very adept at doing).

Written exclusively for WDD by Cameron Chapman.

What do you think of Digg and the controversies surrounding it?

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