Digg.com

Social news site Digg has finally been purchased, in a deal that puts it under the ownership of New York-based Betaworks.

The deal, which was announced on Digg's company blog this afternoon, will put Digg's technology inside of News.me, a daily news e-mail digest.

"Digg will join a portfolio of products developed by Betaworks designed to improve the way people find and talk about the news," Digg's former CEO Matt Williams said in a statement, adding that Betaworks founder John Borthwick will now be Digg's chief executive.

Details of the deal were not … Read more

Social news site and Web 2.0 darling Digg is once again rumored to be in talks to be acquired.

The site, which lets users vote up stories that other users and media companies submit to the Web, has reportedly caught the eye of the Washington Post, the Next Web reports.

Citing "tips from multiple sources," TNW offers that Digg "may have found a suitor" with the newspaper company and its WaPo Labs group. That's the same group that currently has its own social news tool with the Social Reader Facebook application.

Both companies have … Read more

When the news broke late last week that Digg founder Kevin Rose had "resigned" from his post at the company to go after something new, things did not seem well for the start-up. But fear not, current CEO Matt Williams says--all the good changes coming from the company over the past six months were done by a group of people, not just the Digg founder.

In a blog entry on Digg's blog posted this afternoon entitled "the Digg goes on," Williams once again addresses Rose's departure, while sharing some insights about the company's … Read more

Digg co-founder Kevin Rose is focusing his efforts in a new direction.

Following a report on TechCrunch earlier today that said Rose had resigned from his post at Digg, Rose confirmed via Twitter that he was indeed at work on a new project, but that he'd "continue advising Digg / on the board of directors," as well as taping episodes of Diggnation.

As for that next project, Rose said in a tweet that it would be revealed "soon."

Rose had relinquished his post as Digg's interim CEO in August of last year after filling in … Read more

This is a love story with a happy ending--and a little heartbreak along the way.

My love affair with Digg began in 2005, about a year after the site launched and roughly two years before I started working at CNET. At the time, I was printing out marketing materials for a tiny company about an hour outside of San Francisco that was on its way to certain doom.

Things there were bleak, and everybody knew it. My days were spent as an office drone, doing menial tasks with long breaks between the action--a workday that made Digg an appealing place. … Read more

Responding to user feedback following social news site Digg.com's large-scale redesign earlier this week, founder and interim CEO Kevin Rose posted on his personal blog that numerous changes and high-level bug fixes are on the way.

During the move, a number of changes dramatically altered the way users now find stories, as well as where promoted stories end up being seen. And from the looks of things, it appears that many of these tweaks created bugs, or caused longtime users to scratch their heads. "Our top priority is to stabilize the site," Rose said. "Then … Read more

Molly Wood is back in New York for a new Web show on CBS called Eye on Parenting, so of course we invite her on the show to chat with us about Gmail voice calling, the new Digg layout, and an ironic Twitter post from Gizmodo's Brian Lam that segues into a live in-person Molly rant!

Google just announced that it's adding the ability to place real live phone calls and send text messages straight from your Gmail window. Internet calling isn't new by any means, but where you formerly had to arrange a specific time to … Read more

A report posted Thursday by online progressive news magazine AlterNet has detailed a year-long "undercover operation" at infiltrating a group of conservative Digg.com super users called the "Digg Patriots," who use their collective voting power to control what stories get onto Digg's front page.

AlterNet's report details tactics used by the 100-some members of the user group, who allegedly communicate through a Yahoo Groups site, and have done so since early 2009.

Its members cull both Digg's front page and its upcoming section to find what they consider liberal or otherwise anticonservative … Read more

Social news site Digg.com is set to launch the fourth major iteration of its site. Last week the company invited an extra 20,000 users to its version four alpha test--a number that is likely to grow in the coming days and weeks.

Given a tumultuous past few months for the company, which has seen a leadership shake-up at its very highest levels, and what insiders have described as an "exodus" of key employees, version four is more than just a redesign--it's effectively a reboot of the Digg brand.

The most obvious question is whether this new version of the site, which has been teased by the company for the past year, is truly better. The answer is a resounding yes. It's faster, cleaner, and easier to both Digg stories up, as well as submit them. It also does a much better job at filtering the large number of submitted stories by their source. But even with those improvements, Digg feels like the same site it was a few years ago, which will likely do little to silence the site's critics.

A short history lessonHow long has it been since the last major Digg revision? Try June 2006, which is when version three was announced at a bar party, then publicly launched a few months later. Back then, the biggest new feature was the inclusion of video and podcasting content that could play right on Digg story pages. These two additions were brought on as separate sections of the site--both of which would later be consolidated into just a video section when the site added an image category. Digg version 3 also brought a face lift that would let users customize what categories they saw on the front page.

Between then and now, Digg has had a few tune ups, including: • a complete re-write of the site code which ditched MySQL in favor of the more decentralized Cassandra • an overhauled search engine • a framing toolbar called the DiggBar, which drew plenty of controversy in its year or so of existence.

There was also the launch of mobile apps, a user uprising over free speech, and several murmurs of an acquisition.

So what does Digg's fourth version bring to the table? Let's break it down by feature:

New followers/following paradigm, and a social news feed Similar to Twitter and Facebook's fan pages, Digg users can now follow a content source and see when new stories from that particular site have been submitted. Alongside Digg users, you're able to import people from Twitter, Facebook, and Google. This process is actually the first thing users see when logging into the new Digg, though it can be skipped entirely.

The way it works, is that Digg breaks down profiles by category. Each of these categories can be followed or unfollowed, the former of which means new items from these contacts will show up in Digg's new "My News" section. This is simply a listing of the most recent or popular content from sites or people you're following--akin to what you'd get on Facebook's news feed if you were to filter by links only.

How important the new My News page is to Digg is pretty clear based on the fact that it's the default page when visiting Digg.com while logged on. Users actually have to click over to the "Top News" tab of the site to see what unregistered users get. This isn't even something you can change in Digg's drastically simplified user settings panel.

Digg has also added an additional layer of personalization to the site's sidebar, which now populates the top links from people you're following. These are shown in order of how many of your friends Dugg any particular link. And clicking on the story pages themselves shows you those friends in chronological digging order.… Read more