Cynics allege that Web 2.0 is in a perpetual state of beta, but the newest version of Digg.com spent only 3 weeks in beta before opening up for full public use today. The new Digg is most notable for including news categories beyond tech. During the beta period non-tech sections of the site were restricted to logged in users, a group that was surely dominated by geeks already using the tech section of the site. Apparently that will change today. In a sense then, today marks the beginning of the experiment – will the general public be interested in voting on news on a wide variety of topics? If the tepid response to the new Netscape experiment with digg-like features, and the ensuing backlash by long time users there are any indication – it’s not a sure thing.
For more background on Digg, check out Mike’s interview with the site’s founders when this newest version launched.
My main complaint is that I find the categories too restrictive. The pages also appear “slightly jumbled together” for me.
LOL. Yah everyone wants to stay in Beta forever, cause once your out, no one will right about you and your kinda not ‘Web 2.0′ anymore.
The key is stay in Alpha phase longer…
:0
SurfNinja – you nailed it.
I think Digg is great, but I think what made it so great to begin with was the fact that it was technology driven and it wasn’t too much sensory overload. I want to filter out the stuff I don’t care about better. I hate watching Digg Spy go over a kazillion stories I don’t give a shit about.
I like Digg v3 so far.
Brian. You can choose which topics appear in your Digg in the account settings. Does digg-spy ignore these?
It appears that the Digg Spy does ignore your filtering.
Wow, they did the beta thing the real way it needs to be done. Congrats to digg for being a real website.
Digg is the shiznat.
They should enable searching by title. This is a glaring oversight, especially if you’re interesting in reading articles related to PHP. Search for PHP and you’ll quickly see what I mean.
So far, I think the latest iteration of Digg.com is plagued with some of the same old thorns that made their other versions annoying. They should work on weeding out all the “blog spam” other topic annoyances that degrade the overall reading/community experience.
Blog spam, blog spam, blog spam. It’s killing the Digg experience.