Digg was once a superstar in the user-curated social news platform. Shortly after its initial launch, it enjoyed years of being one of the most popular destination sites for people looking for news other than the mainstream news services. It has also been an excellent social media marketing toolfor brands wanting to supplement and empower their Internet marketing strategies. But the past couple of years have not exactly been positive for Digg. Disastrous decisions and drastic changes have stained the once social media giant, causing its user base to flounder.

But after being acquired by a new company, Digg tries to bounce back from the gutter—rebooted into startup mode with a spiffy new site redesign to boot.

Digg: A Quick Glance at the Rise and the Fall

It was 2004 when we first heard about Digg.com, when founder Kevin Rose featured it on The Screen Savers. It started as a tech news site that allowed users to submit news content which other users can vote to make it to the site’s front page. It was basically tagged as a “Slashdot killer.”

The site steadily picked up pace and then struck gold on its second year, especially after shifting gears to include a varied array of topics.

The site recognized all these user interactions and prioritized engagements on-site via diggs, comments, and discussions. Even brands have since gotten aboard the Digg bullet train, using it to expand their social media reach, and boost their content distribution. However, all that changed when the company unleashed their fourth site redesign.

from Twitter user @ceejayoz

Digg.com v4 showed that the company may have its abandoned focus on cultivating engagements, removing a lot of the favorite and most useful features the site carried. This marked the beginning of their downfall. Soon after this, the company’s mindshare and traffic took a nose-dive and large chunks of its now annoyed users began jumping ship.

More painfully, the company was forced to lay off a sizeable 37% of its staff, and went through a string of CEOs, none of which were able to resuscitate the company. Eventually, its most recognizable executive Kevin Rose resigned, citing being “burned out” as the reason.

Many argued that it was already dead in the water. Others were even convinced that the only way it would survive was to be acquired by a larger company. But most of the acquisition buzz around Digg were nothing but rumors, while Google backed out of the deal during the final talks of their botched acquisition.

The Reboot and New Digs

Digg has been through a lot. However, the recent turn of events these past few months have given the once social media superstar a new hope, having been acquired by Betaworks.

For those unaware of who Digg’s new overlord is, Betaworks is a social Web incubator, part of a syndicate of angel investors providing seed-stage investments to startups. They’ve had a hand in the successful soar of social media sites and apps like Twitter, Groupon, OMGPop and Dailybooth in the past, and currently supports the likes of Path, Backupify, Tumblr and Kickstarter.

After the much publicized acquisition, Betaworks posted on their blog that they’re rebooting Digg, bringing it back to its startup roots. This is a great approach for Betaworks since developing startups to full germination is part of their specialty. While this also entails a low budget for its development and daily operations and a particularly small team to run it, it can also be clean slate for the brand where they hope to live down the mishaps and the infamy of its past, and move on to better things in an entirely new direction.

Along with this, the Web site also gets a clean slate. Betaworks decided to ditch the old site infrastructure and instead spent six weeks building a new Digg.com from scratch with a fresh code base and a more solid infrastructure.

The new site is cleaner and uses bigger images on its landing page.  Aside from the new tug at site aesthetics and code base, it also focuses more on some key components like user experience, mobile consumption, and better focus on return visits.

To be able to build the Digg site, the company crowdsourced ideas from people online, setting up RethinkDigg.com as a portal to collect everyone’s opinions and suggestions on how to create the brand’s best iteration yet. This is a remarkable thing Betaworks did during the redesign process, bringing back the power back to the user. This embodied the spirit of Web 2.0 which used to be the very core of everything that made Digg such a revered and beloved site years ago.

This is what they’re aptly calling Digg v1.

Tags: Digg, internet marketing, News Features, social bookmarking, social media marketing, Social Media Marketing Tools, Social Media News