Once upon a time, Digg was a social media Rockstar. It was just a few steps away from becoming as massive as today’s Facebook and Twitter. It embodied the true spirit of Web 2.0. It helped define what we are now calling the social Web. But after a disastrous fourth redesign of their Web site and a string of mishaps, the company was left with but a fraction of its once massive user base. Those who left felt that the company had abandoned its focus on one of its most valuable assets—its users.

Digg’s been through a lot. With their popularity plummeting and its user base slowly shrinking, social media incubator Betaworks swooped in and acquired the former Web giant just last month. A few weeks into the acquisition, they’ve rebooted the company into startup mode, rebuilt its Web site from the ground up, and dubbed it “Digg v1.”

For the who didn’t give up on the site until its last few minutes online, and for the brands using it for their social media marketing campaigns for years, the reboot could bring a lot of changes.

The New Digg Goals

To be able to build a new and better Digg for its user, Betaworks launched RethinkDigg.com to crowdsourced for ideas from people online. From the respondents, they’ve come up with four goals.

• We make it easy to find, read and share the most interesting and talked about stories on the Internet right now.
• The experience must be fast and thin. Let users go, and they will come back to you. We optimize for return visits, not pageviews per visit.
• Build an experience that is native to each device: smartphone, inbox, Web page. Stories must find the user, wherever they are.
• Users must be able to share where they and their friends already are—on networks like Facebook, Twitter, and e-mail.

User Profiles and Archives Are Gone…Temporarily

Image by rogihor

Betaworks wasn’t kidding when they said that they intend to build Digg.com from scratch. They ditched the original Digg code base, infrastructure, and even its archives. This means that seven years of collected user profiles, interactions, and all the stories submitted to the site are gone.

This can cause all the sites linked on Digg and their SEO rankings to take a nose-dive. You can also expect broken links on your site or blog if you’ve linked to your Digg profile or the stories you have on it. Thankfully, Digg has stated that they’ll launch an archive Web site to bring all those back. So if you’ve been using the site for your SEO and social media marketing campaigns, you may have to anticipate a slight dip on the rankings of the pages you’ve submitted on Digg.

Bigger Images for Top Stories

Aside from the new Digg.com looking cleaner and having a more straightforward navigation, you’ll easily notice that they’ve also included large pictures to go with every headlining content. This makes for a better push in terms of aesthetics and to further influence user engagements. This is quite the far cry from the previous Digg iteration where we only get thumbnails for every user and content submitted which didn’t provide much context. The only decently sized images back then were advertisements.

Users and brands can take advantage of the promise of a prime onscreen real estate for pictures, provided that their content manages to get enough votes to make it to the top.  With the photos, they can map out ways to grab people’s attention and drive traffic to their own sites.

Diggs Are No Longer the Only Way to Curate Content

For years, the Digg button enabled users to vote for the most interesting content and curate the headlines that show up on its front pages. It helped make the site a popular destination for finding interesting and valuable content aside from the mainstream media.

But now with its reboot, Betaworks has changed that by including human editors into the mix, and incorporating social media shares on Facebook and Twitter.

“We learned, while building News.me at betaworks, that finding really great stories requires a mix of smart algorithms, smart networks and, not least, smart people to parse the two.” Betaworks stated on the Digg Blog. “Digg is what the Internet is talking about right now, so our team will be watching diggs, Facebook shares, tweets, and a handful of other data to determine where a story should sit on the homepage. Facebook shares and tweets are important signals and will be closely monitored, but we care first and foremost about what Digg users have to say — measured, as always, in diggs.

Tags: Digg, internet marketing, online marketing, social media marketing, Social Media Sites, social media tools, social networks