Kevin Rose has announced that Digg will be expanding to cover product and service reviews.
Rose told the audience at The Next Web Conference Friday that Digg is currently working on a “big project” that will deliver significant enhancements to Digg in the next 6 to 12 months. The new Digg will allow users to Digg anything including services, products and images.
Rose said that context was also an issue for Digg; stories are being buried under the weight of noise making it more and more difficult for users to seek out and find niche stories. Digg is developing a smart suggestion system that will consider the type of stories a user has dugg previously then suggest similar stories based on that history.
The move to product and service reviews seems like the logical next field of conquest for Digg. Having popularized social voting for news why not take the wildly popular concept to the offline world. There will be challenges, but as a Digg user I’m looking forward to seeing what they have in store.
(via Read/Write Web)
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“I’m looking forward to seeing what they have in store.”
Here’s a guess based on Digg now: iPods, iPhones, and more iPods and more iPhones. Then a Dell with Ubuntu. Repeat.
Gadgetize
more like Restaurants where lots of people use ipods and iphones
A herd of users can easily gain access to news and rate it, but it’s much harder to give users access to tangible things that aren’t free to reproduce, such as services or products. I hope flying off on this tangent won’t wreck the original digg.
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That makes alot of sense … they have a huge tech following … can you imagine if they had product reviews on the newest laptops or computers or whatever … those would be great!
Darin
In all seriousness, the only problem I see with it is the brand loyalty and competition factor. If it works the same as news, I could see product review groups springing up to try to beat out other products rather than review anything objectively.
They may well have a mechanism that works differently, and I wish them well regardless.
In 6-12 months huh? - well, that’s plenty of time for someone else to do it before them, and better, and sewing up the market, what ever happened to playing your cards close to your chest?
I really expect Apple products to just get savaged on Digg reviews, don’t you?
It would be great if the Digg crowd were not so biased and essentially fan-boys.
Microsoft could release a time-travelling machine and their would still be Digg users saying the Apple Mac is cooler.
I hate to imagine the treatment anything from the 20th Century Fox Corporation will get, from what I’ve seen everybody on digg is far-left liberal.
why don’t they add something that their users have been clamoring for for months, a pictures section? And I agree with Chris, why would they announce that they are doing it, now someone else is just going to roll it out before them. Weird.
In 12 mos, most of the current Digg’ers will be out of puberty and into girls. Hence, the downfall of Digg.
no more digg for me.
yeah you are true no for digg me too i love its first days.
Chris: exactly. You have to wonder about a company that announces this sort of stuff when they may not be ready to release it for another year. Additionally, there is a huge difference between 6 months and 12 months, especially in rapidly evolving markets. If Kevin Rose really gave such a wide range, he is indicating that Digg doesn’t have a good understanding of its own development cycle. Maybe it’d be better to sit in the office coding non-stop to get your product finished than to be attending conferences and announcing to the world what you’re going to do next year.
As an investor, if a startup came to me and said they’d have a prototype done within 6 to 12 months, I’d walk away because it’s basically telling you that they don’t know what they’re doing. Call me back when you have a better grasp on when you will be able to deliver.
So each user will have his own front page. Where did I see that done before?
Its an awsome idea for Digg - there loads of other things digg could incorporate as well - maybe we’ll eventually see a local ‘digg’ for returants, hotels and stuff! Maybe they’ll concentrate on techy stuff for the time being tho
Unless you heard it first hand, you’re assuming this is an accurate report of what Kevin Rose said, which it may be.
Digg is taking a big risk by trying to expand into a direction which doesn’t match their overall purpose. You got users based on your original concept, and that should be tweaked and improved before branching into unrelated directions. Currently, the search isn’t good, the comment system can use some work, etc.
6 months to a year? What in the world is taking so long?
Have you looked at Digg recently? Most of the stories are basically lowest-common-denominator, if not straight up pornography.
this would help my site considerably due that i am a niche blog. I only write of what i know so i can give my reader the most information about a subject without them having to keep looking for other resources. Just like the Techcrunch is to tech, I want to be to Pro Audio.
der…. yelp works fine and has an actual community of young adults and adults that can afford to go to fancy restaurants and buy the gadgets and toys the kids on digg wish they can afford.
6-12 months for dev eh? they have 20 people working now and tons of cash… 6-12 months eh? maybe someone needs to take a project management class.
I for one am getting absolutely SICK of hearing about digg.com
1. Any PC / Microsoft products will get poor reviews
2. Linux / Apple products will get rave reviews, even half if they don’t know own the product or have never installed Linux.
3. They’ve installed Ubuntu but can’t connect to their Wifis –It will 5 starts out of 5 regardless. They simply leave out the fact that they can’t figure it out. ‘Coz linux is cool and chicks digg it.
4. .ogg vs .mp3 ogg wins duh!
But since we all know what’s going to happen, they’ll try to pull a little rogerian rhetoric in their reviews to sound unbiased, but the end result will be the same. MS products sucks. lol
Conclusion: Just go to Amazon or Yelp.
may be they should make a store of the products that diggers love the most.
dell computers with ubuntu preinstalled, macbooks, iphones, ipods and other iStuff.
That would give digg something that it really means, find a way of making money from that army of fanboys who dont click on ads:D
sorry, mistype.
that would give digg what it really NEEDS (not means).
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I lost all respect for Digg when they caved in to users. Most of whom seem to be in the 13-15 year old demographic. Just the kind of folks I take seriously for reviews.
Wait a minute! Did I just read that right? Kevin Rose just admitted that they have a bury problem?
Many of us have known that for months!
Digg used to be a place where new web entities could get noticed. Now it’s just full of the big name sites. Nothing against Techcrunch but a short while back Techcrunch did a piece on an online Mii editor. At the same time as someone submitted the Techcrunch piece to Digg someone else submitted the actual site Techcrunch was talking about. Guess which one got a zillion diggs and which won only got ten.
The same thing will happen with their reviews. Well that and the potential for libel lawsuits because of the comments diggers will leave!
Digg created a segment. That segment is over-crowded now. It has to do something to keep its lead or perish. This could be a good step but is not a killer differentiator. It is time digg got acquired by some big name like yahoo/google/microsoft.
hmm very apple - 1997 - boston - bill gates big brother like with kevin being up there on the screen.
But ya i think this move for digg could be interesting but then again it could be very restricting as most of the users are from USA so the product/service reviews will be mostly in the USA and for users like myself this could be a downside.
Adding reviews that link to products with their affiliate codes makes them a nice amount of cash. That’s the real reason they are really doing this.
Good thinking.
Techncrunch is a media partner of the Next Web Conference where the interview with Kevin Rose took place. Read more about it here: http://2007.thenextweb.org
To continue the theme, I’m guessing that this will be fanboy-central. As Gagetize implied, factions will arise for one tech or another (PS3’s, iPods, Macs, and Linux are my guesses), and those will dominate. Diggsters will hold up the popularity of their factions as proof positive of one tech’s superiority of another, without hard technical analysis to back it up. It will devolve into furious infighting as the triumphant have nobody else to fight–for example, once Linux “wins,” they’ll start arguing over which distro is the best.
It won’t be Digg’s downfall, because that’s essentially what Digg is today, and it’s very successful at it. Digg is an odd niche player, in that it appeals to a particularly active subset of the tech population and yet enjoys industry-wide buzz. I don’t see this changing anytime soon, and adding product reviews and such only plays on the essence of Digg.
Digg has a good future, but it should start consolidating its position now or let someboy who has a broader outlook absorb it.
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That sounds really neat, but I’m a little confused why they announced it so soon in the development cycle. Doesn’t this give their competitors a chance to steal their thunder?
That said, I’m pretty impressed by the transparency of making that announcement.
So will users be able to digg services or products negatively and positively? How about making it regional?
This seems to be a early sign /
- Im thinking Amazon buys / Digg soon … 6-12 months
6-12 months? That’s life time in “internet years”.
For Digg-style software reviews and user submitted video tutorials, you can use the still un-biased http://www.betamarker.com/
I would like for them to talk about how their system works and if it can be manipulated. I use digg and Netscape - what I find strange is that a story can be dugg in less than 1 or 2 hours and have 100 to 200 yes votes in that short of a time frame.
I have even seen a story that was only posted 10 min. and have 50 diggs.
What is wrong with you people
Digg This: Research shows that the review is extremely important, especially with the Boomers and Echo Boomers. Boomers love the review–before they spend their hard-earned -saved dollars, and the interview or person-to-person facts are what the Echo Boomer wants to know about. (Hello blogs/variable news sources. Goodbye newspapers.)
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They should stick to just adding images at this point. Product and business reviews? I just don’t see this happening. I can already see loads of spam flooding in.