Digg shows page view stats in ongoing effort to recapture relevancy

Social news aggregator site Digg.com has unveiled more new features designed to satisfy users unhappy with the direction the site has gone since a botched redesign attempt last year. Interestingly, some of the features look promising enough that longtime users may be distracted for a few days before remembering the fact that there are still massive issues Digg needs to fix before possibly recapturing its lost user base and site community activity.

In what looked … Continue Reading

Digg's redesign fails to address core problems

Social news aggregator site Digg did a good job last week of unveiling a new look and adding back some features it had removed prior to version 4, but the company still has a long way to go before it finally erases all of the mistakes it has made.

The site became legendary among largely teen and college-age male users who perused the site for the latest in bizarre, tech and political news. So many … Continue Reading

Secret Santa success caps banner year for Reddit

As 2010 comes to a close, social news aggregator Reddit.com is celebrating another success in what has been a year full of them.

A “secret santa” program created by Reddit users expanded to more than four times the size of what it started at last year. More than 17,000 Reddit users from 90 countries are exchanging gifts. That’s an example of how Reddit is flexible enough to allow users to expand and engage the community … Continue Reading

Startup Envolve takes on Meebo with new browser-based chat

Web-based chat client Envolve unveiled plugins today that are said to give it “deep integration” with Drupal, WordPress and other online content management systems. The bootstrapped San Francisco startup hopes the move will help it mount a challenge to Meebo, the leader in the web-based instant messaging space.

The founders of Envolve say they are targeting an area that Meebo is missing. Sequoia-backed Meebo connects people by their social graphs, making sure that those who … Continue Reading

Content-maker BlueGlass launches new tool for online publishers

Online marketing company BlueGlass Interactive has released a content creation tool for publishers that it hopes will put it in direct competition with powerhouse online content provider Demand Media, without any of the negativity that Demand has attracted because of accusations it runs “content mills.”

CopyPress, as the new tool is called, lets clients pick content made by teams working for BlueGlass. The company promises that the content it produces will have a strong SEO … Continue Reading

High-flying Reddit loses chief to its founder's startup

Social news aggregator Reddit.com announced Monday that its chief executive and lead developer Christopher Slowe is leaving the company, even as the site experiences a year of unparalleled traffic success.

Slowe, who has been with Reddit longer than any other employee, is joining the airline flight search startup Hipmunk, home of Reddit cofounders Steve Huffman.

“It’s incredible to think that, back when I started working at Reddit five years ago, our monthly traffic totals were … Continue Reading

Are there any developers left who care about Digg's new 'Streaming API?'

News aggregator site Digg has announced it unveiled a new “streaming API” (Application Programming Interface) that the company hopes will save it from declining traffic and community involvement.

“Today we’re releasing a new API feature which we hope will ease the process of using Digg’s data, and also freeing developers to model and store the data however they want,” said Digg software developer Will Larson.

Larson invited outside developers to create their own applications that … Continue Reading

With layoffs and top execs gone, Digg needs to redesign its business, too

Social news aggregator Digg laid off more than a third of its staff Monday in the wake of a failed redesign, and its top sales and finance executives left — suggesting that more than just the website’s look and feel need fixing. In a post on the company blog, new CEO Matt Williams claimed the cuts, affecting 25 out of 67 employees, were needed in order to achieve profitability by mid-2011.

Digg’s chief revenue officer, … Continue Reading

New Digg CEO apologizes to site's fans

Some six weeks after he was hired to be the new chief executive of news aggregator Digg.com, Matt Williams greeted community members for the first time today, apologized for  the site’s botched attempt at a redesign, and announced officially that several old features would be returning.

Williams sounded candid in his first ever post on Digg’s official blog.

“As many of you know, the launch of Digg v4 didn’t go smoothly, and we’re deeply sorry … Continue Reading

Why is non-CEO Kevin Rose messing around with Digg?

Social news aggregator Digg hired former Amazon executive Matt Williams to be CEO a little over a month ago, but ex-CEO and co-founder Kevin Rose is still fiddling around with the site it seems.

In a move that might have some people questioning whether it’s his place to be doing such things anymore, Rose turned to his Twitter following for advice on a Digg feature: He tweeted a link to a ‘Twtpoll’ asking whether “we … Continue Reading

Is it too late for a Digg comeback?

Social news aggregator site Digg.com is trying to work its way out of the traffic hole it created with its botched redesign attempt. Today it announced the return of several popular features from its previous version.

In the last few weeks Digg has brought back a slew of old features whose absence had rankled site users. The Upcoming section returned along with the pagination feature. Pagination had been removed in favor of a feature similar … Continue Reading

Digg traffic down, but not out

A month ago, popular news aggregator Digg underwent a redesign that many describe as disastrous. Now, despite bad press, site bugs, and a traffic collapse, the company is trying to put a good face on its current state. It sent letters to publishers this week in an attempt to calm them during what many say is a drop in referral traffic.

Time, The Washington Post, TechCrunch and many other publishers have found Digg traffic to … Continue Reading

Reddit buzz wins the site Microsoft ad bucks

Reddit, the headline aggregator and discussion site run by the parent company of Wired magazine, features plenty of talked-about stories. But only recently has it seen news that bodes well for the site’s own business.

Rival Digg‘s botched attempt at a redesign and the announcement of a Reddit-inspired rally in Washington D.C. by TV personalities Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart have bumped up the site’s numbers. Now the site has announced that the buzz has … Continue Reading

Blog platform Tumblr’s soaring traffic brings growing pains

Tumblr, a social media network made up of millions of personal and business blogs, is seeing massive traffic growth, but is undergoing equally big growing pains.

Activity on the network of Tumblr blogs skyrocketed over the first half of the year and reached about 1.7 billion page views in the month of August. (Automattic’s WordPress.com, an older, more established blog platform, recently reported 2.1 billion monthly pageviews.) But Tumblr, which employs about 10 people, has … Continue Reading

Reddit 'excited' about chance to eat Digg's lunch

For a long time now, Digg has been the king of technology news aggregation. Tech fans liked the way they could rate their favorite tech stories highly, and see links to those rise to the top of the site’s home page.

Competitor Reddit.com started much later than Digg, and never really had a chance to catch up — until now. Reddit is not only grabbing traffic from Digg in the wake of that site’s troubled … Continue Reading

Digg's top user warned of possible backlash months ago

The top Digg user of all time has a surprisingly calm demeanor as he brings up how he warned Digg many months ago about the backlash it’s facing.

“Keep in mind, I first voiced my concern about this to the Digg team back in March when I was invited to preview the (Digg) Alpha, so they absolutely knew it was an issue,” says Andy Sorcini, aka MrBabyMan (pictured above with Digg cofounder and chief executive … Continue Reading

Digg freezes manual story submissions as user anger mounts

Popular social news aggregator Digg prevented individual users and publishers alike from manually submitting new content Monday morning.

The site’s block on manual submissions has since been lifted, but Digg users I’ve spoken to speculated that the move might be part of the company’s ongoing efforts to fix problems that have angered the site’s community. (I’m a frequent Digg user myself.)

On his Twitter account, Digg chief executive Kevin Rose didn’t confirm whether the submission … Continue Reading

The problem with Dry Erase Girl: There's no business in hoaxes

The men who fooled the Internet with their hoax about a woman who quit her job via a dry erase board say it made some money for their site, TheChive.com — but that attention-grabbing stunts don’t make for a reliable business model for their company, Rober Media.

“TheChive is already an established and profitable brand with multiple advertising networks representing us,” said John Resig, who along with his brother Leo, owns the hugely popular picture … Continue Reading

'iMac Touch' patent uncovered in Europe

If a patent published recently in Europe is any indication, Apple is planning to build computers that combine touch screen capabilities of the iPad with traditional mouse and keyboard interfaces on the same device.

According to the blog PatentlyApple, the hybrid concept envisioned could mean that at one moment, consumers are running a typical iMac, but with one adjustment, can play famed iPad game “Angry Birds” straight on their 20-inch iMac display.

The crux of … Continue Reading

Amateurish Facebook Live will suck up your time

Facebook kicked off a live streaming video channel today for its 500 million users. The channel, “Facebook Live” comes off as slightly amateurish, and it doesn’t seem to be drawing many viewers yet, but it could become an effective platform for celebrities, companies, and the company itself.

Facebook Live is a slightly tricked out version of the technology Facebook used to broadcast its F8 conference earlier this year. The interface consists of a screen, an … Continue Reading