It wasn’t all that long ago that Digg captured our collective imagination. In fact, even last year Google thought it was important enough to seriously consider buying Digg, only to back out at the last minute. Digg was the future of news. It was crowdsourced, democratic editorial. The masses decided what was news, not some 50 year old guy in a skyscraper in New York, who secretly hated the Internet.
a lot of the shine has come off Digg. And while it still drives a tremendous amount of traffic, it’s amazing to see just how completely it has been eclipsed by Twitter, which in turn is still just a drop in the Facebook bucket.
Comscore worldwide data says Digg, Twitter and Facebook have 32 million, 58 million and 411 million unique monthly visitors (September 2009), respectively. Google Trends says much the same thing, but the growth over time is fascinating visually. We started with Digg, then added Twitter, and then added Facebook. In the end, Digg and Twitter are just footnote blips in the chart.
About a third of all Internet users worldwide visited Facebook in September 2009, says Comscore. A year ago it was 17%. And what about Digg? They grew from 15 million worldwide unique visitors a year ago to 32 million today. And they tripled page views to 171 million. So it’s not really about Digg doing anything wrong. They just pale in comparison to the guys currently in the spotlight – Twitter and Facebook.
If you could only use one service, which one would you choose? I’d be unhappy about the forced decision, but I’d go with Twitter, even with all its flaws.
facebook would be my choice.. it would actually be interesting to have a flavor of digg too in FB!
It was only yesterday I had written about this on my blog. When Digg was the King, there were Gurus who taught us how to get Dugg. Then Twitter came about and now people are teaching us how to get retweeted like hell..
By the time you master the art of social marketing through one medium, the crowd moves elsewhere and this is a very big challenge..
Agree with you completely.
I agree as well. Therefore, I advise firms to work with a firm who lives in the social media and understands the changing marketing fundamentals. Other ways, it is never possible to shoot the target.
An almost identical set of images showed up on reddit last week, though it was larger in scope. It used the visual look of the ‘this is how small we are in the universe’ approach, starting at reddit and gradually zooming out. It was awesome but I can’t find the link. Anybody? Bueller?
http://www.redd...es_of_pictures/
+1 for twitter
+ 2
3
4
-5
-6
Twitter is just a phase, i cant see it lasting. Its one of the pointless sites iv ever seen. I mean who would want to log in to read a short cryptic message. I dont. Facebook trumps twitter and always will. Digg should also do better then twitter, it provides more info the twitter does.
i agree, ask anyone in generation-Y if they joined twitter. 99% havent because they are on facebook and facebook offers much more than twitter.
+1
Very few of my college friends use twitter, but are very active on Facebook. I have had FB since end of
2004.
Even, I am not very active on twitter. I tweet whenever I end up writing a blog post or if I am in some FB/Web2.0 event.
I have however started using it as a filter for news based on blogs[TC, GigaOM etc], and people [VCS, Entrepreneurs] …. somewhat like an RSS reader
Totally agree…It won’t be long before twitter becomes digg…I mean think about it…Have you seen anything innovative come out of Twitter lately? 99% of the time they deal with scaling issues and the other 1% adding minute features like lists which can be coded up in a few hours…
Same here… Since I became a regular tweeter I have almost stopped using Google Reader!
Yeah, 58 million people like to waste their time on pointless sites. And all the brilliant people who use the service must just be disillusioned.
Someone had said the same thing about Friendster, Myspace, Digg & what not. People will move on.
58 million people. I wonder how many of them came back often. I logged in a few times a month, never post, never spend more than 5 mins on it. None of my 20s something friends are like it. All updates are on facebook. Twitter may never disappear, like RSS. But the current celebrity status is way too overhype.
Twitter trumps facebook for me because it gets right to the content which is what i want to see… I get so many facebook notifications and invites to stuff that is much more useless than twitter every day that I’ve all but given up on facebook (I check it now only for the purpose of responding to messages and wall posts).
meant to put this in the original post but Twitter gives me instant access to all of the news sources I keep up with and even real time updates about delays to train services in my city… I will never be able to use facebook for that
I think people that see the real benefit of twitter don’t actually login to the website. I use Twitterlator Pro on the iPhone but obviously there are many more options out there.
One of the best reasons I use twitter (in addition to following people that I admire), is to get updates of what’s going on in NYC. I follow accounts like @theskint and @NewYorkology. Without following these guys I would have to make a conscious effort to go the website instead of just firing up my app when I’m in a taxi, or on the “john” – and I find out about extremely awesome events that I would probably never have otherwise been able to attend (and usually for very cheap).
Couldn’t you just use an RSS reader and flick through some real content rather than descriptions of the content with a bit.ly link which may or may not take you where you want to go? Twitter and all those trimmed links are going to become a phishers’ paradise.
first i think its weird and not usual to compare digg, a news aggregating website, with the facebook or twitter.
if i had to choose one? facebook because not only is everyone on it, but it has status updates and a whole lot more than twitter has to offer.
I understand your comment. But a lot of people use twitter and facebook to get “news” too. But part of this is just to understand just how small digg is compared to twitter and facebook, v. the media attention it commanded for so long.
I agree that it’s a worthwhile comparison. I don’t think it’s an accident that my own digg usage dropped to nothing after I finally groked twitter.
Two reasons:
1. Following your own trusted/respected group of news aggregators will always yield more personally relevant news items.
2. Twitter is more engaging. The mix of friend chatter, humor, and relevant news is a lot more addictive than any news stream alone.
Very good article…
it is? i just sort of threw some stuff i found interesting up on the site. i’d put it as more of a slightly interesting article.
Still, it’s at least 69% more interesting than anything ever posted on Digg. Unless this article gets posted on Digg. Then it’s about the same, I guess.
well thats the thing with digg…its based on crowd..therefore the most highlighted articles are digged (dugged…whatever english is not my native language so i have an excuse to suck at it
) by average people and well, the quality stuff is left behind
I want Comscore data on how many ppl get MA’s sarcasm.
It would be if it was not almost totally ripped from an article posted on Reddit this week, except the original has a Reddit start, then Digg, then Twitter, then Yahoo then Facebook. I can’t believe you’ve missed it because yours looks quite the same, without credits for the original.
The Reddit post : http://www.redd...es_of_pictures/
Pointing on this Imgur’s image : http://i.imgur.com/naZMY.png
So credits should go to Jouni @ Reddit, on 2009, 10, 29th
Yeah and the original is better
You’re hilarious, Arrington.
wat if its not sarcasm but he is serious
+1
Shimon here. Without a doubt it must be Facebook that I would choose. We all knew Digg was extreme 20 / 80 behind the curtains, so no real democracy there! When a couple of my companies have been on Diggs homepage, yes great bump was fun. But as a user, no thanks their picks are a bit weird. Kinda just fancy Slashdot. Also, Facebook has allowed me to re-connect with so many friends, lots from high school even some from early web days in around ‘95. I like how you can click a photo and it goes to the next, nice touch!
I would say fb – I care more about what my friends think and are up to than what Ashton Kutcher had for breakfast… But still wouldn’t like having to make a decision
I agree .I would prefer FB any day .
Facebook is a great social site, I often compare it to a high school reunion. Twitter helps me re-connect with topics of interest-it’s simple and quick and so keeps me ahead of the curve. Digg is still worth a look, but I use it less every year just like Technorati.
twitter – because it has lists now. noise reduction.
I thought lists were a way of following more people. how does that manage to reduce noise?
I’m copping out, here, and just going with the view that they’re “three great tastes that taste great together….”
Twitter is really mostly PR* guys or recent PR grads preaching PR* how-to’s to other PR folks. thats it really.
*self-proclaimed
Saw a better version of this on Reddit days ago, but can’t find the link.
I would have to go with Twitter since it is basically a global read/write feed that is building on the promises of older technologies like RSS and Google Reader. In fact, I ditched Google Reader for Twitter.
I use all 3, because all 3 of them have different purposes. Facebook is for keeping in touch with actual people I have met, and people that I see frequently (real friends). Twitter is how I communicate with people that I’ve never meet and probably never will. Many of the people I follow are people that I admire in politics, music, in entertainment – only a few are actual friends. And I use Digg to find out about news & politics basically point out stupidity in other people’s comments
They all have their own thing.
I wonder how much time/money Facebook and Digg have put into emulating Twitter. No matter how hard they try, they just can’t duplicate the Twitter “experience” (insert Starbucks analogy here).
digg’s community and frontpage’d news articles have really gone downhill over time
the community (as in comments) is not even of average intelligence. but better than youtube commenters.
the items that end up on the frongpage all fall in very predictable categories (design, top 10, sex, odd news, etc etc)
going to digg to get news is just asking for a facepalm. twitter’s trending topics and data aggregator sites are more recent and interesting. facebook is useful for private (you need to add each person as a friend) updates
- At first I was like “Shiiittt”
- Took a double-take and was like “Double Shiiitt”
- Then saw the Facebook graph and yelled “BULLSHIT!”
if Facebook say they have 300m users and Comscore say they have 410m, which one is more full of shit?
Anu Shukla? Is that you?
LMAO!!
My main use of Facebook these days is through their iPhone App.
Ditto for Twitter. I generally interact with Twitter through Tweetie on the desktop or on the iPhone.
My understanding is that ComScore does not take this usage into account.
Does anyone even think that Twitter’s page views are relevant?
Yeah, it’s for the website, but really, no one uses the service on the web site after they sign up, so a fair comparison to other sites just isn’t there.
It’s like trying to compare page views on AOL’s instant messenger site vs IM client usage. It just doesn’t make sense.
I’d say Twitter’s “page views” are 10x what is listed here if you could client usage.
facebook is a potato. You can have it as french fries, as boiled, as roasted and as vegetables in many ways. I wonder where will be the end of facebook race!
I agree. You can make anything out of Facebook, but you can only make Twitter out of Twitter and Digg out of Digg. Facebook is all of those things… now they have to just get smart enough to enable you to sort all the data by type (ex. links only, status updates only, photos only, etc) and you’ve built Twitter, Digg, and Flickr. Add search? Powerful.
I wonder, though, if (when?) people will start getting cagey about one company having literally every artifact of their lives online: relationships, wedding and breakup photos, even what you had for dinner last night… yes, for the most part, people can control who sees the information, but at the end of the day, Facebook still has all that information to use however they want to (marketing).
I have never felt compelled to Digg anything, visit digg.com or put any credence in the number of diggs.
Digg was ‘gamed’ too much.
MA, I think you left out a biggie here: YouTube. YouTube spreads news really fast too, either through videos, or bulletin updates on users’ channel. YOUTUBE POWER!
How the mighty have fallen
Apples and oranges.
And several basic mistakes regarding basic written English.
Seriously, Mike, time to hire a sub-editor.
If I had to pick, it would be Twitter. But that’s me
I don’t think the charts fairly represent Twitter, however. Google Trends can’t plot the serious amount of traffic that happens off the Twitter site itself.
When I was testing traffic received by a site from Twitter, looking at log files versus a tool like Google Analytics, I was finding a gap of 500% to 1600%. Lots of people were coming to the site via Twitter but not via Twitter.com itself.
The people who are interested in what you write about are the same people who tend to try 3rd party apps. You have a self selecting audience.
The mainstream audience (the Rick Sanchez, Ashton and Oprah crowd) use the web site.
If i had to pick it would be twitter i seem to use that more these days.
digg is boring now, haven’t been to that site for a while
Twitter manage to create certain atmosphere around their product which could be compared how people relate to apple. They have less users but they are more enthusiastic and devoted than Facebook.
Many people use Facebook only because it’s biggest so it’s more practical. Same thing with windows.
Personaly, I don’t use Digg at all, mostly because they have lousy way to filter information. Facebook I use less and less. Too many stupid apps and borring updates. I filter almost 70% of my friends.
Twitter is more about giving while facebook is more about expressing yourself so Twitter would be my #1 choice
not into twitter as facebook has it all.
Facebook is good for social networking and sharing while Twitter and Digg are great for immediate news broadcast and keep in touch with the latest trend!
All of its pros and cons and it really depends are what the targeting audiences are!
Twitter, because it is more interesting and more dynamic…and because my mother doesn’t try to comment on tweets from my colleagues the way she does on Facebook.
How is Twitter an alternative to Digg? Or Digg to Facebook?
I’m sure you don’t need to be told they provide very different services, so what is the logical basis for your comparison? It is perfectly possible to use any two or thre of them at the same time. Sheesh!
I don’t get the point in comparing Twitter, FB and Digg.
It’s like saying “hey, these days what’s hot between young people? Pizza, basketball or classmate fightings?”
Besides, saying that Twitter is a kind of “news site”, is sort of simplistic.
How one can be sure that FB traffic growth is in some way related to Digg stagnation? It could be the case, but to prove it one has to point out something more than what’s stated in this post.
This is more a post of the web surfing habits of the average SV resident: given 7 (or 3? or 15?) sites he daily checks waking up, what actually are these sites?
Disappointingly superficial.
I loved this article because it points out that Digg is becoming less relevant. Facebook, StumbleUpon, and Twitter have become more of my choice social networks. Those social networks have been adding features rather than stripping them like Digg has been doing.
Digg started by removing the list of the powerful users. Then they removed the shouts feature which I liked. Then they added an annoying toolbar and short URL service that unfairly gives Digg more traffic. What has Digg done for their users? Nothing.
This reminds me of what I wrote yesterday in response to an article from NAA.ORG: http://search.i...ngine-chicago-t
I think if there is more competition among rating systems that’s great. It will separate the wheat from the chaffe: spammers will spam indiscriminately, but real people will be sensitive to what each audience/community wants to hear / is interested in.
So the whole idea of “who’s the best” is nonsense, just as the idea that 1 website might be a portal that “organizes all the world’s information” is nonsense. Such one-size fits-all notions are the dung that attracts spam flies — and such aspirations are non-web (which is why Google — even if it isn’t EVIL — has nonetheless become mainstream media: 1% information, 99% spam + advertising).
Hurray for the distributed web!
Oh yes you should take a random website everyday and campare it to facebook and tweeter.
Digg is a site where you go during your cofee break to see the funny photos of the day.
Facebook is a site where you have to be for no reasons.
Twitter is a site where you don’t go if you are 30% or more non geek.
This was an incredibly pointless comparison.
What do you think will be the next No.1? Will twitter take the spot or will it be a new site?
I landed onto this post from Twitter!
Also think how usefull Twitter can be as a substitute to text messaging in emerging markets.
We can do it
While it’s interesting to see just how much traffic Facebook and Twitter are attracting between them, I don’t think it’s a fair comparison to pull Digg into those graphs because it’s a different kind of service.
If you’re going to compare apples with apples, take a look at this graph, which compares Digg, Reddit, Slashdot and Stumbleupon: http://trends.g...=all&sort=0
I would choose … the service that has yet to come. I don’t really believe in the wisdom of the crowds, thanks. would wikinews be an odd choice here?
” … some 50 year old guy in a skyscraper in New York, who secretly hated the Internet.”
Grow up, Mike.
“And what about Digg? They grew from 15 million worldwide unique visitors a year ago to 32 million today”
Is it just me or does the Digg graph show a DECREASE over the past year rather an increase.
Yes, I was wondering when someone was going to point that out.
I agree – to me that graph looks like there’s been around a 30% *decrease* in unique vistiors to Digg since Oct 2008.
I would undoubtedly choose Twitter. I am in direct contact with the newsmakers with no ad-infested filter. Even Facebook is better than Digg as I see it. Digg’s approach, while novel for a while, has fallen by the wayside.
If forced to use just one, I’d have to go with Twitter too!
Digg = Mob.. they control what gets dugg. So screw them.
Twitter = Current Trend
Facebook = Current Fad
I would use neither for news Mike. If i want tech news, i go to Techcrunch. If i wanted Breaking World News i go to CNN.Com or BBC. If i want financial news, i go to Yahoo Finance, Bloomberg or Reuters. If i want local news, i go to my local news portal site. If i want gossip, i go to Perezhilton or TMZ. Get the point Mike? If i want sports news, i go to ESPN. If i want to watch pxxn online go to YouPxxn.Com. If i want to download stuff on my PC, i’d go to CNet. If i wanted PC Hardware reviews, i’d go to TomsHardware. If i wanted Blackberry news, i’d go to Crackberry. If i wanted to see photos, i’d go to Flickr.
If i’m bored, i’ll just go through Tweets that i follow and click links that i find useful on Twitter. If i wanted to view trash news, i’d go to Digg. If i had no life, i’d probably hang around Facebook.
It’s called MIND POSITIONING.
Pretty easy choice. I choose Twitter of course. Twitter is the simplest and at the same time the most versatile service. Twitter is a swiss armyknife but still doesn´t feel complicated at all, from a user perspective.
Twitter and FB both rock as a social network and digg as a knowledge sharing platform. My choice would be twitter as its the simplest and can be used as just ANYTHING.