Regular users of Digg are aware that the social tagging and commentary network has launched. Dubbed “Digg v1”, the new look and feel for the site was outlined on the Digg Blog just before launch.
Digg v1 changes a lot about the network. Specifically, it changes the way users interact with the main screen at Digg.com, how they comment, and how it interacts with popular social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and email systems. It’s a total re-design of how Digg operates – a bold step to take for a service that has become one of the largest social tagging, sharing and commentary sites on the Web.
Early mockups, such as that shown here, give insight into how the team began from the ground up for the site, beginning with design elements meant to put more information in front of the user without over-cluttering the screen.
Much more emphasis is being put on images and graphics from the articles being tagged – something missing in Digg before and blending Digg with other, more up-and-coming services like Pinterest. The entire look centers on three things: Top Stories (memeing), Popular, and Upcoming (newly rising in popularity).
At immediate launch, the core service (for most Digg users), commenting, was gone. This was quickly added in, though, and had been promised, but was meant to undergo heavy reconstruction first.
What’s the big deal? Well, the very basis of Digg in the first place was to “vote up” things we liked. Big “digging” something, we added to a vote count that raised the popularity of the item in question. Today, though, every site has something like this. We have “Like” and “+1” and so on. So Digg is moving away from that and concentrating instead on integrating with other networks, so that a “Digg” also means an automatic “Like” and an immediate “+1” and so on. It also boosts the commenting system so that it can become more universal to the networks we all use as well.
Great stuff and we’ll see how well this goes with Digg users over the coming weeks.
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