The much anticipated Digg 3.0 launched this morning as promised.
My first thoughts are – it’s beautiful, although it isn’t stable yet (search in particular seems to be breaking, although there are other small bugs too). The integration of Ajax to move between topics and betwen headline and new stories is really well done, and is by far my favorite feature.
With regard to the new features, I get the impression that Digg is trying to get good stories up to the home page as fast as possible, something I didn’t really pick up on in our podcast with the Digg founders. At least three features seem to push this.
First, putting an “upcoming” stories tab right next to the headlines tab makes it much easier to switch between the two categories, so more users will look at upcoming stories too, instead of just reviewing the headlines. Second, the “cloud view” (not a new feature) for upcoming area clearly shows which stories have momentum by making them bigger in the tag cloud – these stories will naturally draw more attention and diggs, more quickly pushing them to the front page than before. Finally, the new “agreed on” feature to see stories that at least two of your friends have dugg (in left sidebar) will again draw user attention to those popular but not yet headline stories. Combined, these features make it much easier for users to see stories that have a lot of momentum but aren’t yet on the home page. I will ask Digg if one of their goals is to get stories to the home page faster than before, and if the new features are successful in doing that.
I noticed the high volume this morning as well. Overall, 3.0 is VERY well done! Great job Digg Team.
Digg 3.0 is cool, but a little buggy. I tried to changed my avatar, but Digg’s crop feature ended up with a blank white square even though I did not do any crop. But overall , I still love Digg! Look for our launch sometime today too. Gizmoojo.com – Digg for Gizmo reviews!
It doesn’t use ajax to switch between topics, frontpage/new stories.. It’s just reloads blazingly fast.. Or am i wrong?
Looks very promising, especially with the bigger range of topics now covered it will be even easier to find something to blog about.
Digg got digged ! Can’t see it.
I was up and kept refreshing when they first launched it and I noticed that it was a bit buggy at first, but now it’s a lot better. I’m liking it very much.
Since most of my stories on ‘Serge the Concierge’ were not Tech Oriented, I did not pay much attention to it.
Now that they added ‘World News’ (including Offbeat News) that gives me an avenue.
I just posted my story on Oaxaca, Mexico a couple minutes ago.
The only thing that was a bit sluggish was the ’submit the story’ part.
My first impressions.
Serge
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Very, very neat UI. Everything is in its correct place, excellent color scheme, fonts, font-sizes, images and almost everything is just perfect.
Only thing is that its a bit too slow still, as usual. Hope they do something to reduce loading times.
More ads near the story but providing more niches seems like the right idea. also much more importance now placed on relationships and activities among friends. not sure how relevant that will be but interesting approach. anyone check out the new t-shirts in the bottom right?
CasaMan is right. It is a reload.
TC: “the new “cloud view” for upcoming area clearly shows which stories have momentum by making them bigger in the tag cloud”
This is not a new feature. Cloud view has been around for a while.
Why oh why did they move the sidebar to the left? Just annoying as all hell.
Biggest plus on this upgrade: no more politicaly biased troll articles clogging up what was supposed to be a tech news site. They should hopefully all be under World & Business / Politics.
I think it is great. Instead of wasting a bunch of time at one shot. I can shoot in and shoot out. At least it seems that way. It just seemed so much more tedious before. I would check out the current. Then I would shift over to see upcoming. Then I would have to then browse over to the navigation to search.
Somewhat suprised at the love digg is getting here. The new design seems worse than the old one with a much narrower (and fixed-width) content column, more adds, and less information displayed on the page (for example, “who dugg or blogged this” is now hidden in a seperate tab, rather than on the main page).
It’s a bit shonky.
It’s great, but I have one big complaint. Why do I need to login if I wish to read non-tech news? I read digg almost exclusively through my desktop feedreader, which does not log me in.
They either overlooked this or it’s a cheap way to drive traffic to the actual site (even though, as far as I am concerned, loading an item in my feedreader is visiting the actual site).
absolutely flawless execution. my first use was like i’ve always been using it. 3.0 upgrade = homerun winner.
Good feedback here. Thanks.
CasaMan’s right. It’s just javascript for the opening menu and otherwise it’s a full page reload to move between topics or between popular and upcoming. It’s nice and fast right now, though we had a few load issues this morning.
Jeroen: The new sections are currently in a short period of beta so that we can make sure everything works smoothly before releasing it even wider for everyone to read. We just wanted to somewhat lessen the load for the first bit just to be on the safe side and we thought a fairly wide open beta was the best balance between being secretive dorks with a private beta and allowing the tide to rush in too quickly.
Dan100: The main reason the “who dugg or blogged this?” stuff is on a separate page is to improve the load speed of story pages. Showing a bit less content on that page means a lot less queries. It also means if you don’t want to read all of the comments you can jump right to the other sections without waiting for all of the comments to load on a page with a ton of comments.
So how come Digg doesn’t work with del.icio.us?
There’s a tie-in with Blogger et al, why not del.icio.us?
Correct me if I’m wrong here, but I’m sure the tag cloud has always shown higher dugg stories as bigger in the cloud.
Daniel: Sounds fair to me. Please hurry. I kid, I kid.
I wonder if getting stories on the homepage “faster” is really a good thing. Personally, I’d rather see stories on the homepage that are “better”.
Digg is already problematic because it allows users to see the number of Diggs a story has. For true crowd wisdom to kick in, it assumes that every individual is acting independently, with no knowledge of how others are voting. By letting users see the number of Diggs, it encourages a “follow the pack” behavior by which the popular stories get more popular.
It seems like they’re adopting a system where they’re encouraging users to digg stories with a lot of diggs already. Which means that “early momentum” almost becomes a more important factor in getting to the front page than the quality of the story.
Personally I’d rather see them hide the total number of Diggs (or at least bury it somewhere it’s not so visible), and focus on getting quality stories on the front page vs moving stories there quickly.
Aside from that though, I really like what they’re doing.
I liked Digg more yesterday.
Daniel, thanks for the explanation for moving some content to a seperate tab. However I just couldn’t get on with the new layout, so restored the old one using CSS. Details on my blog.
Digg 3.0 is a big yawner. They didn’t really add much. There are glaring holes in their “Digg Topics.” Reddit is looking better and better everyday.
I really expected them to add tags to the site, especially since all the new categories make it easier for stuff to get lost. Is there any particular reason why tags might not be a good idea for a site like Digg?
It’s alright – but I think it needs to be 100% wide. Move the skyscraper add to the right.
The new UI is neat, personally i like it alot. But is it going to entice more non-tech users??
The ui is nice and a little easier to navigate. As far as ads go, that’s fine too…they’re not too distracting. My biggest issue is what I was afriad of when I initially heard of the update. The original user base seems to have dropped off the site. The comments I see now on the technology container are childish, uninformative and useless. I use to look forward to the debates and helpful feedback in the comments….now it’s full of inane flamwars and trolling. I think I might just head to slashdot for now on, it’s really too bad too because I liked digg alot. I also believe it’s only going to get worse in the coming months as more and more new users begin to “contribute”.
Although Digg now have more verticals, will they be able to go beyond their primarily tech-savvy user base? my guess is that the stories in other verticals are probably interesting to their tech users but may not necessarily be what other types of users find interesting.
The new features at Digg 3 are pretty interesting and I am sure the Digg community will start developing more Digg tools to further tweak the interface and use the new features.