Last month we wrote about the new Digg toolbar product called DiggBar. It launched today. If you want to try it out immediately, just add “digg.com/” before any URL at all (the image above is using the techcrunch domain).
The toolbar is made for the new Twitter generation, which has a desperate need for very short URLs to fit in the tiny space allotted per message. Digg is going to be a popular player in this space because of the easy way to create the URLs (just pop digg.com in front of anything), as well as the stats that they provide in the toolbar wrapper: number of views, comments on the story, and related stories.
StumbleUpon has their own product called su.pr coming shortly as well.
Here’s the official post from Digg on the product, and a demo video:
DiggBar from Kevin Rose on Vimeo.
Pretty cool.
Can’t wait to try the Twitter product also.
Who thought this space would be so valuable.
I love it
I freaking hate digg.
Installing this toolbar right now because this is a badass idea!
Installing…what?
i thought digg was dead
Until Digg.com allows site owners to embedded Digg comments in their pages, it will continue to plateau until it ultimately fails for other reasons (political bias of content promoted to homepage, mainly).
digg is dead. you heard it here first!
digg est mort ++
So very un-SEO friendly too.
Why? Doesn’t hava anything to do with SEO. Digg just opens the webpage in an iframe.
I’m going to cry. Goddamnit Digg
this is way too cool, I like using Digg the most because they get your website indexed really really fast. Plus, you get ranked higher than any other website when you use digg. this just makes the process even better
thats so cool. nice idea ,,, never seen something like this before….
I agree with swag…
This is horrible tool from a content publisher and SEO standpoint.
It utilizes javascript to frame in the site.
This means you can’t bookmark the site, or internal pages because you would be bookmarking the digg.com url. It also means you can’t easily get the REAL url of the page or site you are on right from the address bar.
It’s good for Digg, bad for site owners.
Cool idea, but I’ll stick with bit.ly or tinyurl.com thank you.
“Digg is going to be a popular player in this space because of the easy way to create the URLs (just pop digg.com in front of anything).”
Pretty convenient indeed. Guess I’ll start using their service from now on…
I agree, from a content publishers perspective it’s annoying. I don’t like someone stamping their brand on top of my content.
The fact that the top url doesn’t change when you click links is also really bad for usability.
At least with tinyurl if people want to reshare links they have the option of sharing the real url, with this people are just going to pass on the digg one. This of course means that digg gets all the credit for the links and potentially the digg url ranking higher in search engines than the original content.
Im guessing that Google will be smart enough to work out which is the original content and which is the Digg version and rank accordingly.
Hmm. It depends from where you bookmark the page. If you bookmark it from a browser add-on than you are right. You would bookmark digg. If you use a bookmark icon on the page you would bookmark the page.
Digg could increase your visitor numbers or their own. Anyway I like digg and the diggbar.
Toolbars for social applications, yeah that doesn’t feel like 1998 at all right?
Ever heard of Plugins for FF? Stop making toolbars people !
I hope you’re joking… I *HATE* dealing with the growing number of plugins.
Digg’s method actually seems more convenient to me.
some people don’t seem to realize that this is not a browser toolbar that you install… it’s simply an iframe loading other sites below it in the browser window. nothing to install. not 1998 at all…
Digg could have an even shorter URL: du.gd is still available – http://tr.im/i3um
Very interesting to see how successful this will be. I’m sure it will get a lot of users very soon
wow … this was very simple, well designed and implemented
http://digg.com/d1h9W6
= 404 not found. Digg toolbar doesn’t seem to be working yet.
The digg brand makes me shudder. Other than that, the shortened URL that could be 4 characters shorter.
Nice Facebook Connect intergration, TechCrunch!
Another short message (url) http://www.sm.tv website/service.
I would actually use it if it was a plugin
Who wants to keep typing a url in front just to use it
Who want’s to keep installing plugins? No me.
Not* me.
(I know the grammar police are just waiting to blow hot air)
I love it right now! Is the twitter product available?
This just shows how ridiculous the 140 character limitation is. Who wants to click on a shortened URL – you have no idea where you’re going. Twitter should just add a link field or let people use more characters rather than force people to use a workaround that takes away useful information about a link.
That’s the case for Bit.ly, but not Digg.
Digg has a better value proposition, as users will probably use it without the intention of even creating a shortened URL (i.e. to get the comments, submit the story, etc).
Good implementation.
Hmm, interesting implementation that looks pretty. I have to agree that this is a nightmare for content publishers, as it highjacks the experience.
Fantastic – I love it!
Just revived my digg account which I hadn’t touched since 2006!
Safari 4 beta doesnt seem to like it….
I think it’s terrible. By using that shortened URL Digg gets the clickthrough- not you, the webmaster. Google tallies clickthroughs from SERPs to figure out PR so that’s an important and often entirely overlooked matter. Here’s an example of the fallout from this strategy:
You publish a new post called “I’ve invented purple peas!” on your new website, http://purplepeas.com.
It gets popular after an avid fan submits it to Digg.
Now Digg is already leaching link juice and clickthroughs from you with a siphon – even without the new Digg Bar in place yet – so expect to see your “purple peas” post in 2nd place in the SERPs for a search on “purple peas”, while Digg.com’s story link will be in 1st place, where it will pretty much stay forever.
Add in the Digg Bar – now almost no one is visiting your site directly to read your popular post. They do it from Digg’s shortened URL. What do you think that does to your search engine results for “purple peas”? That’s right – you don’t stand a chance against Digg now, buddy.
The Digg Bar is the most brilliant move Digg ever made for their own SEO since they’re going to get more backlinks now than anything else besides the entire Google index.
I had a feeling about a week ago Digg was going to do something like this so I took the survey they had on the topic and implored them to find a way to stop sapping link juice from webmasters. My words fell on deaf ears. Which I fully expected.
If you don’t want to give the top spot to Digg in SERPs then don’t let your content be submitted to them. You’re just shooting yourself in the foot for temporary traffic that doesn’t come back. I love Digg – but having popular content on it is still an SEO nightmare.
IF there was justice, GOOGLE would ban Digg.com from the serp’s completely as this is verging on a blackhat type technique to leech links off of everybody else’s content that has nothing of value added by digg
ARE YOU LISTENING MATT? if it was a small guy doing this Google would ban him from the serps without even a second thought, but from Digg.com they will probably ignore it
This is great!
anyone have an idea how i can build a clone for myself?
neat stuff!
It is definitly a nice feature, but every webmaster or siteowner could add a small peace of Javascript on top of every page and the diggbar disappears.
Got any suggestion or links to where webmasters could get that javascript code? That would help curb the kind of hijacking of websites that is so trendy now for shortening urls to use on Twitter.
Here is the code and a short description. But again: I don’t think this one is hijacking. Digg could increase your visitor number. You should use it for other webpages who hijack your content.
http://en.wikip...iki/Framekiller
Example: The diggbar doesn’t work on that page:
http://www.nyti...s/24savana.html
It disappears, but Digg still gets to record the initial hit and their overall visitor #s will spike. It’s a shitty move on Digg’s part.
People seem to have a short memory around here. This is nothing more than framing… it was popular in 1998 until the people doing it got sued out of existence.
http://en.wikip...t_v._Total_News
More recently though, in the Perfect 10 v Google/Amazon case the court said framing was legal… but I see more than one lawsuit in Digg’s future.
Don’t get me wrong, I like Digg and use it everyday. However, in this case, I think they’ll see this as a strategic mistake.
Well, it certainly sucks from an SEO standpoint, but maybe this will backfire and @kevinrose and his crew will finally disappear forever. I’m not very happy about this change, but I’m hoping that there will be enough backlash to kill Digg for good.