Digg to Stop Shortening URLs for Just Any Sites

About a month ago, Digg CEO Jay Adelson stepped down, and Founder Kevin Rose stepped in to take his place. It didn’t take long – the next day in fact – for Rose to begin making some changes.
Digg announced it was dropping the DiggBar – the company’s iFrame toolbar that was the subject of a fair amount of webmaster controversy. Part of the DiggBar’s functionality was to shorten URLs with Digg’s own shortening tool, for any site on the web.
Now Digg is doing away its URL-shortening for the web. That is unless it is a story that has been submitted to Digg. Starting May 17th, this will be the case.
"Users will continue to be able to share their favorite Digg stories by generating a short URL via the ‘Share’ button," says Digg’s Keval Desai. "However, it will not be possible to generate a short URL for a web URL that does not refer to a submitted story on Digg. The ‘shorturl.create’ method in Digg API will be deprecated as of that date. Previously generated Digg short URLs will continue to operate beyond this date."
Clearly Digg isn’t interested in competing for any kind of URL-shortening dominance. It’s more than happy to let you use bit.ly and all the rest. In fact, the company is even directing users to this big list of such services.

Detailed Look at Reasons People Visit Various Social Sites

As with traditional media, it’s different strokes for different folks on social media sites.  And knowing your audience’s needs and preferences is just as valid in PR today as it ever was.
According to an analysis of social sites by online advertising network Chikita published by Mashable, people go to Twitter for news, MySpace for games and entertainment, Facebook for news and community and digg has a mixed bag.
Another post from Chikita shows that Facebook is far and away the best source of loyal visitors – over 20% of all visitors from Facebook visited the referred site four or more times per week.  Digg came in second place with slightly over 16%.

New Digg Buttons Keep Traffic With Publishers

Digg has launched some new Digg Buttons and a widget generator for publishers, which the company refers to as updated tools to improve speed, usability and flexibility of integrations for publishers. A representative for Digg tells WebProNews the updated tools are "one of the many steps we’re taking in advance of the official release of the new version of Digg to make the user experience more inviting and the publisher experience more customized and measurable."
The new version of Digg was recently unveiled at SXSW.

Features of the new buttons include:
- Dynamic display of live Digg count (a feature Digg says statistics have shown to increases likelihood of user interaction)
- The buttons no longer take users to Digg (traffic stays on the publisher’s domain)
- Faster load time
- Customizable look and feel (includes new "medium" button size and an unstyled option so a publisher can create their own custom designed Digg button)
- Related stories from the publisher’s domain to users that click the button
Existing Digg buttons will auto-upgrade over the coming weeks, Digg says, but they recommend that publishers review the new documentation for optimization tips.
With the widget, headlines now link directly to publisher content with the Diggbar, as opposed to Digg’s own page. There are more customization options that don’t require publishers to use the Digg API. There are tabs and columns that let publishers add multiple columns to a widget, as well as make a double column widget. Thumbnails are attached to each story, when available, and if there isn’t enough content to display, the widget will backfill with other relevant content from the same domain.

Digg Launches New Extensions for Firefox and Chrome

Digg has launched new extensions for the Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome web browsers.
"A month ago, we announced new capabilities that let developers create writable applications with the Digg API," says Dig’s Chris Howard. "We decided to put this to work ourselves and update our original Firefox Extension and also create a new Google Chrome extension at the same time. In both cases, you can now Digg stories as you browse the web, without having to come back to the Digg site each time."
The Chrome extension includes the Digg count for any URL. It’s displayed to the right of the browser’s address bar, and users can click it to see the title and comment count for that URL, as well as the button to Digg it. It also comes with ways to share any URL (like through Twitter, Facebook, and email).
There is a little more to the Firefox extension. It improves upon the existing FireFox extension. Digg has moved the Digg count and Digg button to the navigation bar, so the toolbar doesn’t have to be open for users to Digg stories. The toolbar itself is shorter and has added keyboard shortcut functionality to make it easier to hide and show it.
"This makes it really simple to check out the Digg story details for a URL and then close it when you’re done," says Howard.
Digg has also added controls in the toolbar settings, such as notification thresholds and a smaller notification box. These features were designed to make notifications less intrusive to the user.

Digg’s New API Allows Digging of Stories and Comments

Digg released a new version of the Digg API today, which lets developers write and contribute data via OAuth. This API supports the digging and burying of both stories and comments.
"In addition to the revamped API, we focused extensively on usability and have included an updated API documentation section on Digg with more detail on each API method including code and response examples," says Digg’s Jeff Hodsdon. "Today’s changes, as well as our updates this summer to the API license, give developers much more freedom to create (and profit from) great new applications off the Digg platform."
"To help showcase some of the new functionality, we’ve created a reference app off the new API, a streamlined version of the Digg site called DiggLite, which can serve as a blueprint for any basic Digg-based application," Hodsdon adds. "It includes a river of the most recently popular stories, which can be Dugg and buried remotely, and the means of breaking things down by top-level topics. You can find it at digglite.com or download the source code on Github."

Developers interested in keeping updated on happenings with the Digg API can follow @diggapi on Twitter. Digg says it will communicate any API-related issues and downtime information through the Twitter account.
At first, only a limited number of beta testers will be able to create apps that can write data, using the new API. Digg is requiring developers interested in creating apps to send a brief description (along with their Digg username) to api@digg.com.

Important Product Director Moving From Google To Digg

When Google’s current director of product management arrived at his desk this morning, he did so for the last time, according to a new report.  Keval Desai is supposed to be leaving Google in order to start a position at Digg.

Desai – who’s been with Google for about six and a half years – didn’t exactly do unimportant work.  In fact, he led the development of AdWords, which is one of the search giant’s most recognizable products, and was also a force behind TV Ads, which has outlived Audio Ads and Print Ads.

Previously in his career, Desai cofounded a company with Michael Arrington and put in some time at Morgan Stanley Venture Partners, too.

As for what Desai’s supposed to do for Digg, Arrington wrote this afternoon, "He’ll be Digg’s first head of product, a responsibility that has been shared at various times by founder Kevin Rose, CEO Jay Adelson and Chief Strategy Officer Mike Maser."

It seems Desai’s headed almost to the top of the organization, then, and will probably exert a big influence over whatever "ballsy" changes are on the way.

Stories Get a Shot at the Digg Home Page

Digg has launched a new homepage voting experiment called Digg Trends. The feature will promote "certain highly active stories" as they are trending, not unlike Twitter’s trending topics. 
The feature could give stories a better chance of getting more exposure when they otherwise wouldn’t necessarily made it to the front page. Digg’s Kurt Wilms explains:
Digg Trends identifies and highlights upcoming stories that have a high volume of activity (think Diggs, comments, favorites, shares, etc.). When we detect a new trending story, it will appear on the homepage for ten minutes. Based on the Digg and bury activity in those ten minutes the story will either become popular or not. To make it easy to follow the action, we’ve setup a Twitter account to tweet out when a new Digg Trend is up for voting on the homepage. 

Digg says the goal of Digg Trends is to put high activity stories in front of the community quickly and present a fun way for people to express whether they like a story or not. "We only show the most basic information for each story so as to ensure that voting is as unbiased as possible," says Wilms.
Digg has often been criticized for being too clique-ish, meaning it has been hard to get on the home page without having the right friends, although Digg has taken steps to make the site better for more people in the past. This should help that as well.

New Digg Buttons Keep Traffic With Publishers

Digg has launched some new Digg Buttons and a widget generator for publishers, which the company refers to as updated tools to improve speed, usability and flexibility of integrations for publishers. A representative for Digg tells WebProNews the updated tools are "one of the many steps we’re taking in advance of the official release of the new version of Digg to make the user experience more inviting and the publisher experience more customized and measurable."
The new version of Digg was recently unveiled at SXSW.

Features of the new buttons include:
- Dynamic display of live Digg count (a feature Digg says statistics have shown to increases likelihood of user interaction)
- The buttons no longer take users to Digg (traffic stays on the publisher’s domain)
- Faster load time
- Customizable look and feel (includes new "medium" button size and an unstyled option so a publisher can create their own custom designed Digg button)
- Related stories from the publisher’s domain to users that click the button
Existing Digg buttons will auto-upgrade over the coming weeks, Digg says, but they recommend that publishers review the new documentation for optimization tips.
With the widget, headlines now link directly to publisher content with the Diggbar, as opposed to Digg’s own page. There are more customization options that don’t require publishers to use the Digg API. There are tabs and columns that let publishers add multiple columns to a widget, as well as make a double column widget. Thumbnails are attached to each story, when available, and if there isn’t enough content to display, the widget will backfill with other relevant content from the same domain.