Earlier today, Digg unleashed its version 4.0 redesign, finally going live for all its subscribers after nearly a couple of month of invitation-only alpha testing. This, Digg founder and current CEO Kevin Rose, announced on the social news site’s official blog along with a handful of user interface tweaks and new features that aim to enhance usability, social connections and news sharing.
“I’m excited to announce that today we opened up the newest version of our Digg platform.” Rose said. “This redesign is a major revision of our platform–front end to back end–this is just phase one of what will be an on-going, iterative process, involving lots of input from all of you. We’ll be pushing out features on a regular basis and tweaking often.”
At the onset, you will notice that the Digg It bar is now ubiquitously positioned at the top of every page to make story submissions a whole lot easier. In addition to this, if you are logging in to the v4.0 for the first time, Digg will prompt you to hook up your Digg profile with your Facebook and Twitter accounts. This will enable you to easily submit stories via either social networking site of via e-mail.
Perhaps two of the biggest inclusions in this new version is the My News feed and the Suggested User List. The latter will supply you with a list of news sources and influencers on Digg like Leo Laporte, CNET or The Huffington Post which you can add to the list of people you follow. This is an obvious nod to similar features its social media brethrens Facebook and Twitter has been utilizing.
After completing your new follow list, the site will now take you to your My News that displays the stories the users you are following have dugg.
“What you know and love about Digg today is now represented in the ‘Top News’ section of the site – here you can still find content discovered by the global Digg community.” said Rose. “Now we’ve just made it easier to share that content with your friends and see what they’re recommending.”
These seem useful enough for disseminating news across the Web site and encouraging both social interactions and for targeting audiences for brand development, reputation management and search engine optimization. On the flipside, the focus on personally crafted news feeds can also be a tad bit invasive. Sure, new users may easily get acclimated to the interface redesign and its ensuing features, but the hardcore power users could take a while to even get on board. Borderline abrupt, changes like these can prove to be alienating enough to be a disservice to its loyal users though it remains to be seen whether these would readily be accepted by Digg’s user base.
Tags: Digg, News Site, Redesign, Social Media
