Stacks, Graphs, whatever…

Useless info for those that have no clue as to what it means…

Numbers, Big Deal… It all looks like “Pong” & “Space Invaders” to me…

yup, agreed. gimmick.

Sports?

The geeks are gonna be pissed… gonna go all Dungeons & Dragons on Jevin’s ass.

Most of these additions — friend’s tracking/Spy/etc. — to Digg seem quite useless, I’d rather see major UI upgrades rather then Digg Stack + Swarm.

I think Digg should have stuck to their core market–technology news. The stories from every other category are, in my opinion, almost always sensational and worthless. They make all of Digg seem like a gimmick and as cool as the swarm and stack might be on a purely technical level, like previous comments mentioned, they don’t do much to make Digg look less gimmicky.

In other news, SNY acquires Slashdot; John Madden signs a three year deal to host Rocketbook; and Nene gets VC from Sequoia Partners.

Yeah, that’s what I thought.

Digg is forgetting it’s target. they should make new sites for different topics instead of putting all eggs in one basket.

Sort of looks like “Pong” or something

Looks like Missile Command and Asteroids games….

Pong was fun. This might be too…

If you guys don’t like it stop complaining. And if you don’t understand it go to diggnation.com and watch epsidoe #51 where they talk about digg v3 and digg stack and digg swarm. Also remember digg is a user based news site. They can branch out to whatever they want. Do you really think they just wanted to add more categories to have more categories? No what they most likely did is look at how many different stories were being submitted and what categories those fall in. They then say ok we have people who are interested in this and this lets put that stuff in as well. I’m sure they also got feedback as well for digg v3.

So what they add sports. Is it going to kill you guys or be the end of the world? For a while digg got kind of boring always coming to the same tech stuff. Now it’s a whole lot more interesting cause of these different categories. Oh and just so you guys know they’ve always had science, gaming, and politics from what I remember. Digg isn’t like any other site. Later on you guys will find those two features useful. I guess it all has to do with if you saw diggnation episode 51.

Just fancy bells and whistles which are actually of no use.

Kailash did you read my comment by any chance? Go watch diggnation episode 51. A screenshot can only tell so much. When you see it in action your views on it will change. This is useful if your wonder how many people are digging your story by the minute, hour, etc.

Actually these “fancy bells and whistles” are first and foremost to enable Digg to better visualise and analyse the data they’re getting about stories and users. They just happen to be allowing the general public to be nosey at them as well if they want to.

Digg swarm would look really nice in a screensaver. I wish that someone could do this.

Any word on when they plan to launch the API they announced when they launched v3?

Dave you have been voted Digg Fanboy of the year. Instead of going off on a stuttering rampage of “Oh, Oh… and..and..so..so..”, of how episode 51 will enlighten us and convert us to the one and true Digg, why don’t you help us out. How will these two new features help you in using digg, or get more value from it?

From the users perspective, my opinion is that these two new features are nothing more than bandwidth wasting eye candy meant to mesmerize the little kiddies, and make the homepage stories rotate even faster.

Found this this site yesterday http://www.diggview.com

helpfull with all these new categories

I never said they would help you. I said that it would tell you how many people are digging your story by the minute and hour if your interested in knowing. Also I think thats another thing they are trying to accomplish to rotate stories faster. This week for two days in a row I saw the same stories on the front page. For the digg swarm it allows you to get a better view of what stories are out there. It’s a bit of a pain to go through 10 - 20 pages of of up coming stories. Digg Swarm will give you a more of an overview. It does look confusing though. Oh and Koquest that would make a really nice screen saver. Maybe some one will come out with one some day.

If you want the OLD Digg.. You can edit out the old categories. Personally I like Digg. I like being able to look at many different types of information.

FLUFF! Gimmicky. Cluttering up the site. Simplicity is what made it what it is. They are starting to loose focus.

You have to keep in mind that their vision is something like bringing news to the demographic that are actually relevant to their taste. They probably have the mentality of “If they don’t like it, it just won’t get dugg” which seems correct to me (i.e. if the demographic doesn’t like sports news, they just won’t digg it and it will just stay burried.) But, let’s say something big come along like “Michael Jordan returns to the basketball scene,” then I would think a lot of digg users would digg something like this even if it is a sports news.
As for digg swarm and digg spy, I think this is more for the hardcore user that is on it for hours at a time; this might be why many of us don’t see the functionality/reason for these.

I think that people are viewing this too narrowly. If you continue down the path that Digg is the future of news publishing, would it not stand to reason that you would like to make it easier for those who’ve not yet “got” what you’re doing to “get” it? And being that most people understand visualizations easier that would be the way to go?

From an average user stand point I agree, this may not be of any use. But if you’re a news editor or freelance journalist or anyone interested in the truth who has the resources, you could use this as a tool to investigate futher and clarify things that people really ARE interested in. Or try to branch off from those stories or use it as a queue for what you should be covering.

Aside from all of that, has anyone here condemning these actually used them yet? Are these the final screens? I think it’s safe to say that these could be considerably better than everyone is speculating. Or they could suck hard. We’ll all find out on Monday.

EDIT: digg swarm and digg stack

If you’re gonna put flickr photos of the new digg stuff, you have to link back to their respective flickr photo pages, I think.

Data visualization is the future of these types of sites and the web for that matter, people will pay big bucks for this kinda stuff, they want to see data easier and faster.

I think digg is just taking the next steps foward.

Dave, how much is Kevin & Alex paying you?

I like digg a lot but they should stick to stuff that matters and not jump into things that are useless. Great job done!

Big whoopdie ding, a couple new visualization tools.

Digg really needs to stop working on this fluff and work on the basic functionality of the site, and debugging what they have before adding silly tools like this.

I think that Sports is going a bit too far. It pisses people off enough that politics is in there but a sports section is getting to far away from what digg was intentionally intended for. I hope they reconsider.

It would make a great screen saver, is that even possible, eh, Kevin?

Extremely cool visualizations, and yeah.. total screen saver material

The point of these ‘visualizations’ isn’t to be ‘cool’. The internet is all about storing, organizing and making it easy to retrieve data. These tools help with the latter two. And they’re not cluttering up the site with them. If you have absolutely no interest in using them, you’re not forced to. Like the digg cloud view that exists now (which I absolutely love), it’s going to be a separate section that you must navigate to.

I guess you could view these improvements as strictly for power users. If all you care about is seeing the stories that make the front page, that won’t change at all. If, like me, you’re interested in tracking trends and historical data in as user-friendly a manner as possible, these two new views should prove invaluable. I just hope their mechanisms are opened up in the Digg API so someone can make use of the them in their site…. or an screen saver

I don’t care how nifty the animations and visualisations are - if the content is crap to start with they wont be help at all

Finally Digg for sports!

I fail to see how the addition of new topics and categories is negative in any way whatsoever. You can personalize your own experience to remove any category or subcategory within digg with only a couple of mouseclicks. If you hate hate hate politics, then go remove it. If you only want to see tech stories, you simply set it up that way.

Digg was never meant to be a technology site, it was meant to be a news site. It simply started with a techno-centric attitude, since that’s what many early adopter people on the net care about.

The visualisation tools that Digg is releasing weren’t even developed by Digg. They were created by a third party company, at Digg’s request, and with Digg’s support. So those that are complaining that Digg is spending too much time on frivolous things like this, you are in err. They didn’t spend much time, if any at all on the development of those tools.

Most, if not all of the Digg employees were hard at work updating the UI, which so many of you still seem to be complaining about, even though Digg V3 was only released as recently as a month ago, and showed an extremely substantial UI update.

All the complaints I’ve seen commented here so far have had all the impressiveness of a 5 year old when he doesn’t get to watch his favorite cartoon. No constructive feedback was given about exactly what’s wrong with the things you find irritating, nor were ways in which to fix it and make it better offered either. I suppose this may not be the appropriate place for it, though, either, as I would imagine few to no Digg employees will be frequenting this article’s comment section, so I’ll reserve judgement on that aspect.

Back to the article’s topic, the visualisation tools they’ll be releasing look quite intriguing to me. I have been looking forward to them ever since I saw Dave’s raved about diggnation 51. I see a few benefits to this type of technology being added to digg. On the more practical side, you will be able to view the overall digg community and a larger selection of their submitted articles using these tools than you would be able to feasibly sort through otherwise. As it stand now, when you digg for stories, you get a glimpse at roughly 20 or so recently submitted articles on a statically generated page. Refresh every so often, I might catch a few more new ones, but I’ve inevitably lost out on some of them simply by having to weed through the first 20 or so. These tools allow me to view potentially tens or hundreds of articles at once, and show me the diggs as they’re added in real time. By viewing how quickly or often articles are being dugg, these tools also show me on a very broad sense and scale which articles are the fluff, as Duncan used earlier, and which ones are the creme de la creme, and should be commanding my attention. Sure I could wait for them to hit the front page, as many do, but I hardly see the need to wait any longer, when provided with convenient tools like these. And it fits in extremely well with their social networking site model, by giving you a way to quickly look at other diggers habits and their interests.

With that said, I absolutely agree that they aren’t for everyone. Just as some see no need for entertainment news, some people will find no use for these tools whatsoever. These people will hit the site, look at the most dugg stories for that day, and then navigate away to the next site on their agenda. But for those that just simply love their news and everything to do with it, these tools are a fascinating and potentially valuable way for them to take all that news and view it in a really organized way so that they can swallow it all just a bit easier.

I, for one, think it will be a great addition. And I believe others will too.

It’s scary how many ways we can take social bookmarking/networking sites, and analyze that information.

What I’m worried about is how this data is going to be commercialized. In an era of ’speed’ marketing, both stacks and swarm provide invaluable information about what are the likes of a community - and I can begin to shape my products, or shift perception of my products, according to those likes.

I don’t care for the Swarm or Stack at all, but I’m happy that they’re adding sports. It was the only obvious category missing after they expanded from technology, so this really completes their coverage.

Kevin and Dave,
You guys seem to know a whole lot of what goes behind the Digg doors. Are you guys the office janitors?

Kevin,
Your 2000 word essay might be a bit too much for us 5 year olds. Next time try and leave a simple ‘comment’

I think adding new categories especially Sports is really a good idea. Visualizations tools like Digg swarm, stack in addition to Digg spy and cloud view are really cool since they provide the bigger pictures (not just 15 stories in one page). Seeing things really time is more fun.

My only concern is with slowness which needs to be addressed first. Not sure if this slowness is due to v3 launch last month which increased the traffic on digg..

That’s great news, I was wondering why they didn’t have sports during the first release, at least now I am good.

No one can deny those visualizations are pretty nifty. I think that the “wisdom of crowds’ thing is a bit overrated though. Most of the news that floats to the top of any of the aggregator sites seems to be pretty sensationalistic and/or vapid.

Wow I couldn’t believe I was reading a discussion regarding digg. I thought some one was changing Saturday morning cartoons.

A tool isn’t stupid or good, it has a use if you don’t have a use for it then don’t use it. Don’t hate something you don’t have a use for, it just makes you look like a republican, or an old person.

The addition of categories is in response to user requests, and market research. Beat it nerds the addition of politics/sports/yes even entertainment news will not take from (y)our experience of digg.
………in fact if they added the ability to not only restrict what categories you see but then allowed you to restrict down what diggs you see. By what categories those users have visible…..so then you could restrict YOUR digg experience to just news about x-men action figures from/by/for people who care about x-men action figures. But otherwise shove it on trying to restrict the worlds experience via digg down to what you care about.

In fact I think bringing more digg’rs to the effort is always a good thing, by whatever means they are drawn in. And the best way to make heads or tails of what is going on is going to be with analization tools.

Good work Kevin, Dave, joel, DrBenway, and anyone else who offered constructive criticism, or adds to the collective conscious that is digg.

flame on…..all you others

peace!

The Sports Category was added today - along with a Political Opinions Category

L’information interessante que vous avez! I’am allant revenir bientot.

luogo fine, sapete..

Luogo grande! Grande giusto! I miei riguardi migliori al proprietario:)

um… buoni, realmente buoni luogo e molto utile;)

Great site! Good luck to it’s owner!

Stupore! ho una sensibilit� molto buona circa il vostro luogo!!!!

Interessare, molto interessante. Come avete fatto questo?

Ich fand gute und wichtige Informationen - dir zu danken.

Du musst ein Fachmann sein - wirklich guter Aufstellungsort, den du hast!

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luogo fine, sapete.