Liz Gannes

Recent Posts by Liz Gannes

New Digg Team Publishes Redesign in Progress

The oft-chronicled tale of Web 2.0 star Digg includes multiple incidents where the company alienated its users by making dramatic changes and policy decisions without much warning.

The new Digg — bought by John Borthwick’s Betaworks — apparently won’t be like that. Today, the company published screenshots and overviews of its upcoming product overhaul, six weeks into the new ownership.

Digg still had more than 16 million monthly unique visitors when it was bought, but it’s possible that redesigning out in the open may help woo back the critical techies who had deemed Digg irrelevant.

The new Digg is to be heavy on images. In addition to Diggs, the new calibrations of what stories matter will include Facebook posts and retweets, as well as human homepage programming.

The service will also add back some early Digg features such as the “Upcoming” story section, and will get rid of comments (those might be re-added in a later launch, according to today’s blog post).

Digg relaunches for Web, mobile Web and iPhone later this week.

Digg was split into multiple parts for sale earlier this year, including its technical team, patents, servers and the service itself. Betaworks bought the service for what was widely reported as $500,000, but apparently included additional equity consideration.

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There was a worry before I started this that I was going to burn every bridge I had. But I realize now that there are some bridges that are worth burning.

— Valleywag editor Sam Biddle