Digg's Kevin Rose Talks About New Look, New CEO and How to Turbocharge an Old Web 1.9 Company!

Yesterday, BoomTown drove over to Digg’s San Francisco HQ to pay founder Kevin Rose a visit.

The 33-year-old Rose is one of the iconic entrepreneurs of recent years, since Digg’s founding in 2004, driving the growth of the news discovery service in the early years of Web 2.0 to heights of popularity and, yes, massive hype about what he calls a “Web 1.9″ company.

Inevitably, there came a wall of growing pains that Digg has tried to scale, included a very public failed sale to Google (GOOG), layoffs and the bumpy departure of its CEO, Jay Adelson.

Rose has been in charge since, as interim CEO, working to release a much-needed new version–V4–of the Digg service over the next weeks, even as he searches for someone to take over the leadership and tries to figure out what the future of the company should be.

A lot of the changes in V4, Rose acknowledges, have to do with catching up to what other services are offering and are aimed at making Digg–which has always had a passionate, and sometimes volatile and controversial, community–more easily social and innovative.

Thus, the “New Digg” will be more personal, giving users a “My News” look at Digg first, rather than just shoving the most popular stories forward. The changes also suggest profiles to follow, an ability to find friends, better commenting features and more.

Rose has been managing this product overhaul, even while Digg undergoes tough challenges to morale as it seeks to re-establish itself during massive change in the social media landscape and the entry of more and more heavyweight competitors, such as Twitter and Facebook.

Perhaps the most interesting part of the video interview below is Rose’s assertion that Digg needs to be more than a “big small company,” due to its ever-increasing challenges of helping readers make sense of the social Web and its flood of information.

With all the hype and swirl around Digg over the year, I had forgotten what a thoughtful and smart entrepreneur Rose is, but here it is on display, with him talking about it all, including how to avoid being a Silicon Valley cautionary tale:

http://twitter.com/quippd quippd

Interesting stuff happening at Digg — it is very similar to the kinds of things that we (quippd) are doing with social news — except we are focused less on “links” and more on “stories”.

The next few years of social media are going to be interesting for sure!
Anonymous

I have confidence in Rose. I joined Digg in early 2005, not too long after it was formed. I stayed loyal for several years until I found out that Reddit had a better community. Better links, quicker news, and better comments. That’s the heart of business, right? Attracting the users for a user-based content aggregator.

I know that Kevin and his team will find out the right game mechanics to keep users coming back. They’re young and talented.
http://www.shadowspawn.net shadowspawn

All users hate change. This I am full aware of through years of experience performing at different levels of an organization, from the bottom to middle to the top- lead chef with the carving knife poised at the codebase ready to hack apart and rebuild.

Digg.com was famous for what it did, not how it looked, silly rabbit. Tricks like this are for kids. With ADD.

Digg.com’s users are not a swarm of facebook users who just stumbled upon digg after they read it somewhere.

This is such a facebook copy that it makes me wonder who is copying whom and for what purposes. News is filtered, almost all relevant content and methods to aquire it are now missing, and users who made the website what it was are screaming for blood. Bugs aside (everything has them) the new revamping of what worked is indeed a misstep.

The very same users that drove millions in advertising revenue to digg.com and all links to digg.com (you have to add it up, advertisers LOVE their content linked from digg.com)… that userbase will go elsewhere. Dollars will disappear. Traffic will go up, but the bounce rates will go up faster on the graphs than google’s traffic shows it going down, not to mention the advertising revenues.

Users will take their frustrations out on digg (while they have energy until they realize it’s a futile effort) by posting in the comments on the very blogs that struggle to generate dollars on the clicks they were relying upon from digg.com. Bloggers and news sites, especially their advertisers will not want such a campaign and distance themselves further from digg.com

Digg was a form of grandady link aggregators and went through changes well. I have to give Kevin Rose some props: he’s never made a bad decision before. That unfortunately has had the repercussion of not realizing what a bad decision *is* first hand.

And this one is a doozy

Digg's Kevin Rose Talks About New Look, New CEO and How to Turbocharge an Old Web 1.9 Company!

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