In the last six months, the new Digg team has released an iPhone app, an iPad app, a new site design, and an new email subscription product. The momentum is enough for Digg’s new owners, Betaworks, to say that the “Digg effect” — the massive swell of traffic that sites used to notice when a post or page was dugg — is coming back.

Unfortunately, if this is success, I’m not sure what failure looks like:

Digg traffic, according to Compete.com

Digg is careful to say nothing about traffic in its post, but it does say that “we doubled our users.” My guess, given the chart above — and the fact that I’ve worked on web apps with hundreds of thousands of once-active but long-gone users — is that this is not daily active or even monthly active users but simply an overall user count.

Betaworks’ strategy with the new design is to make Digg “fast and thin,” with the thinking that if you “let users go, and they will come back to you.” The strategy may be working with new users — although the current site, with Digg counts of 15, 50, and the low hundreds, would argue otherwise — but it looks like the millions of all Diggers are not coming back to the updated site.

Which is rather ironically, you might think, labelled v.1 on the current site (top left):

That millions of former Digg users are not coming back makes sense, of course, given that after the redesign, Digg is no longer really Digg; it’s just some site with a big history that features content that a few people view and respond to.

Regardless, Betaworks and the new Digg are starting to think about making money.

In an era of native ads like promoted tweets and posts, however, Digg’s strategy isn’t highlighting awesome (and sponsored) content — it’s hyping mobile apps that are looking for users. It seems more than a little random and unconnected to the core products, which is odd given that one of the site’s stated criterion is monetization that  “aligns to the grain of the product.”

The idea is simple: Across mobile, desktop and web, there are lots of great developers building great apps, but most people only ever see a tiny fraction of them. …

So here’s how it works: Each week we select an app to feature on the Digg homepage, and we label it with “Apps We Like.”

But what does that have to do with cool viral content that hip web surfers want to share and upvote? Kinda nothing.

Perhaps the word “yet” is the most operative one in “not dead yet.”

(Digg general manager Jake Levine and I could not connect for his comments before publication.)

For Twitter users, the social network has become the ultimate source of news. Abrams, the site’s founder, said that the idea has been brewing for a few years, and he frequently turns to Twitter as a source for tech-related content.

On Nuzzel, you sign in with Twitter, and the site gets to work in seconds, aggregating news that your friends are posting. Most of us aren’t on Twitter all the time, so it shows you top stories that you may have missed. My news feed primarily consists of tech and startup news, as I primarily follow people in industry. In its current form, Nuzzel appeals to those that follow a more diverse range of people on Twitter; they’ll encounter the full spectrum of news.

Abrams, who didn’t raise any funds for his latest venture, developed and designed the site single-handedly. He plans to raise a round of seed funding in the coming months and to recruit a technical team to build out the product.

Social news aggregators are a dime a dozen; Nuzzel competes with News.me (folded into Digg) and Summify (acquired by Twitter), as well as beautifully designed news curation apps like Pulse.me and Flipboard. These startups are direct competitors when Abrams launches its mobile version, no doubt already in the works. For an analysis of the social news curation space after Digg’s acquisition, check out this Wall Street Journal piece.

Still, Abrams says he has a very different vision for the site, “which will eventually become clear.” I have to hand it to him: The site is easy to use and is highly intuitive, very impressive given that this is a bootstrapped effort.

“We all need help managing the overload of social sharing, but we don’t want to miss anything either,” said Abrams, hinting at the future direction of the product. “That’s why Nuzzel matters.” Currently you’ll find a “news you may have missed” section on the site’s clean layout, which shows stories shared by friends of friends, or by the people followed by the people you follow. It exposes you to a broader mix of news.

Abrams won’t have any trouble raising funds for this latest venture. He is the visionary entrepreneur behind Friendster, and he runs the Founders Den workspace with Data Collective‘s Zach Bogue. Prior startups include a social network Socializr (acquired by competitor, Punchbowl), and social bookmarking service HotLinks.

Iconic social news sharing site Digg launched a completely revamped version of the service today, one day ahead of schedule.

Previously, Digg was focused almost entirely on allowing users to vote on community submitted URLs, with the best stuff rising to the top for increased presence and generating massive traffic for the site that hosted the content. It got to about four versions under its previous owners, who attempted to change Digg in an effort to boost monetization. Changes in the old Digg v.4 made the site a convoluted mess of activity, which slowly drove away the bulk of its active users after launching almost two years ago.

By contrast, it took Digg’s new owners about six weeks to completely re-imagine the site as well as formulate a plan to restore Digg to its former glory. It was completely rebuilt from scratch, which is why the team is calling this the new version 1.

“The old Digg infrastructure was expensive and it afforded us little latitude to innovate and build at a fast clip,” the team wrote in a new frequently asked questions page. “We are starting with a fresh code base — it’s modern, it’s fast, and it’s shiny and new.”

And while I haven’t spent much time playing around with it, the new Digg is already more inviting than the one I saw over the past two years.

Just as yesterday’s relaunch preview described, the new Digg is much cleaner and quicker than the previous version. Familiar visual elements, like  “digger” icons and 8-bit shovels, are gone. The abundance of Blue, Yellow, and Green have been replaced with lots of white space. But the biggest difference is undoubtedly the absence of submitted stories listed vertically along with a prominent box displaying the number of Digg votes next to headlines.

The new Digg also does something unlike most social news sharing services that have a centralized front page: it lets the content speak for itself.

Much like the wire frames indicated in the Digg preview, the site displays more important stories as larger, along with that story’s image. If you’ve gone through the bulk of “Top Stories” on the front page, just below it is a list of “popular” submissions, which displays user names and activity data (Digg votes, social shares, etc.) in addition to the submission’s headline. Below that is the “upcoming” stream of real-time submissions.

Some of the things the new Digg team will be working on over the next few months include experimental commenting features, alternate front page story views, a better mobile experience, reading list for web visitors, and a new Digg API. The team is also working on a way to restore all the user data from previous versions of the site. (For now, the team has set up a page where old Digg users can sign up to get notifications about getting their data back.)

I’m sure I’ll have more thoughts on the site once I’ve had a chance to play with it. For now, let us know what you think about the new Digg revamp in the comment section below.

Betaworks is showing off a preview of its forthcoming Digg v.1 redesign today, which looks much cleaner and less convoluted that the current version.

Originally launched in 2004, Digg was the first of the big community news sharing social networks, which allowed users to vote on community submitted URLs, with the best stuff rising to the top for increased presence. The site began its fall from grace in 2010 with the launch of revamped (and somewhat contradictory) news gathering system that allowed web publications greater control over what was submitted. The changes led to decreased user activity and, in turn, less traffic to web publishers. More recently Digg was sold to Betaworks, which later announced it would be building a brand new, stripped down version of the site from scratch.

Today the new owners published a blog post about how the new Digg will function and what people can expect.

“The experience must be fast and thin,” Betaworks wrote. “Let users go, and they will come back to you. We optimize for return visits, not page views per visit.”

This particular comment from the Betaworks team pretty much hits the nail on the head in terms of what was wrong with the old version of the site. Digg’s previous owners concentrated on changes to the site that would build relationships with publishers — promising them high traffic gains, analytics, promoted story ad opportunities, etc. These changes degraded the overall Digg user experience and then assumed that people wouldn’t look elsewhere (meaning other social media channels like Twitter and Facebook) to find their news/web content.

The new Digg v.1 basically tosses out any feature that doesn’t directly enhance the user experience.

The team is getting rid of the “Diggbar,” a frame that displayed a navigation bar at the top of any website that was submitted to Digg. The point of this feature was to keep users engaged on Digg, which was constantly sending users outside of the site to view content. In practice, it caused much pain for users and often prevented them from seeing submitted content easily. Additionally, Betaworks is getting rid of the “Newsrooms” feature, which was far more useful for publishers than core Digg users.

The Betaworks team is also simplifying and renaming the news streams.

The “newswires” stream, which consists of new user submissions that flow in real-time, will once again be called the “upcoming” stream. And ripping  a page out of Reddit’s book, the new Digg v.1 correctly distinguishes between the most popular stories (stories with the most votes/site activity), and “Top Stories” aka Reddit’s “What’s Hot” tab. The popular stories stream consists of what people say they like the most, while the “Top Stories” stream will now be an actual representation of that sentiment that goes beyond Digg. The old Digg treated these two streams as one constant stream (aka Digg’s front page).

“Today, we vote on Facebook with every share and on Twitter with every tweet, and conversations take place across loads of different sites, apps, and networks,” Betaworks wrote in the blog post. “So how do we surface ‘what the Internet is talking about,’ when the Internet is talking beyond the walls of Digg.com? We tear down the walls.”

The “Top Stories” stream of content will act as a sort of real-time news gathering aggregator that heavily relies on Bitly’s Realtime short URL search engine technology, as VentureBeat head honcho Matt Marshall wrote about Saturday. I’m assuming activity from Digg users will be the basis for the “Top Stories”  aggregation algorithm, but tweeting, retweeting, liking, stumbling, etc. will also have a big impact. (As a side note, this should also help ensure the “Top Stories” stream isn’t easily gamed by spammers.)

One thing that will be absent at the time of launch is a working comment system. Betaworks said that conversation is already happening on other social networks and to “do it right,” Digg’s comment system needs to take that into account. I can’t say I disagree with the logic, especially since comments on Digg are rare these days.

As for the overall “Rethink Digg” preview, Betaworks makes a compelling case for long-time, inactive Digg users (myself included) to check out the new site when it launches.

Check out some shots of the new Digg v.1 from Betaworks below, and let us know your thoughts in the comment section.

When the social news tool Digg relaunches next week — Wednesday to be exact — it will get help from a new product called Realtime, a search engine that surfaces links being shared the most across the Web.

Realtime is owned by Bitly, the URL shortening company with the biggest market share. Bitly has long worked to offer useful analytics around the vast troves of data it collects from the links people are sharing with its service. And with its Realtime, which launched today (TheNextWeb appears to have seen it first), Bitly is bringing a version of that offering to users for free with a much nicer interface. Realtime lets you filter searches of links by subject, social network, keyword, domain, language and country.

When I first saw the report this morning about Realtime, I pinged John Borthwick, chief executive of Betaworks, which now owns Digg, and which also owns a large stake in Bitly. He confirmed that Digg will be drawing on Bitly’s intelligence, including from Realtime.

Yes, that’s Bitly’s silly little logo at top left.

Betaworks is a major investor in a bunch of companies, including Bitly, Chartbeat and SocialFlow, that are all collecting realtime data about information being published around the web (VentureBeat uses Chartbeat to track the traffic of our stories). While Betaworks is building quite a focused portfolio with these properties, it’s also true that Betaworks no longer has full control over some of them, including Bitly. Bitly recently raised $15 million from Khosla Venture and other investors. That company launched a social search engine product for enterprise customers in October.

The Realtime service is in beta. I went to its site (http://rt.ly/) and registered, and got access immediately. See below a screenshot of the results the service gave me when I searched for “Olympics” under topic “sports” with no other filters. The results are quite relevant, pulling up what look to be very popular results (about the opening ceremony, and Ryan Lochte’s win of the first U.S. gold medal).

However, other searches show the service has some ways to go. For example, I searched for “Microsoft” under the topic of “news”, and found completely irrelevant results (“Usher’s Stepson Buried” and “Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong joins The Voice”).

Digg has its work cut out for it, because Facebook has just launched a product that looks like a Digg-killer: a recommendation bar that shows you articles from around the web based on what your friends are reading. If Digg borrows from Realtime intelligence, however, it can easily expand beyond what’s popular on Facebook, and draw from a bunch of networks around the web, including Twitter, Tumblr, LinkedIn and Ameblo.

And then there’s Google’s launch of its own URL shortener service, to take on Bitly. That, combined with Google’s powerful search technology, as well as Google Plus, gives Digg yet another competitor.

See more details about the plans for Digg’s relaunch here.

“We learned that no one is happy with the current state of Digg.”

Those are the words of Betaworks’ Jake Levine, now Digg’s general manager, on the conclusive feedback of thousands of people who responded to a survey on how to improve Digg.

Betaworks acquired what was left of decaying social news site Digg two weeks ago. The New York-based startup-building machine has since teased its ambitious goal to remake Digg from the inside out and announced plans to release version one on August 1. Friday, the group also called upon the Internet to help it “Rethink Digg.”

Rethink Digg they must, as 92 percent of people surveyed said they would not recommend the current version of Digg to a friend.

“This level of dissatisfaction does not call for incremental improvement,” Levine said. “The problem we are trying to solve with v1 — how can we deliver the best of what the Internet is talking about right now? — calls for something else.”

The new Digg won’t just be an evolution of the current Digg, a Reddit clone, or a Hacker News ripoff, Levine said, without shedding any additional light on what version one will look like. We do know, based on a few hints, that the Digg experience will center around news discovery, have mobile as a part of its DNA, and take some inspiration from News.me, the social news applications for iOS also built by Betaworks.

But let’s call a spade a spade. Today’s obvious revelation by Digg’s new owners about the current state of the service’s disrepair and the promise of something very different is just foreplay, playful teasing meant to keep us all on the edge in anticipation for what’s to come. Let’s hope we get a big payoff come August 1.

Photo credit: Louish Pixel/Flickr

Digg is dead. But keep an eye out on that grave, because new owner Betaworks plans to resuscitate the once famed social news site. The company will unveil its surgically remastered machination on August, 1, less than two weeks from today.

“On August 1, after an adrenaline and caffeine-fueled six weeks, we’re rolling out a new v1,” said Betaworks team members Jake Levine, Michael Young, and Justin Van Slembrouck in a blog post Friday morning. “With this launch, we’re taking the first step towards (re)making Digg the best place to find, read, and share the most interesting and talked about stories on the Internet.”

Betaworks acquired the remaining technology pieces of eight-year-old Digg for a reported $500,000, after the Washington Post Company nabbed most of the service’s engineers for an estimated $12 million and LinkedIn collected 15 Digg patents for around $4 million. It was thought that Digg’s technology would be folded into News.me’s social news applications for iOS. Today, the team behind New York-based startup News.me, a Betaworks company, made it clear that Digg will be born again.

Digg is worth protecting, said the Betaworks boys. “We acquired Digg because we all need a product to help find, read, and understand what the Internet is talking about right now,” they said.

To remake Digg, a team of 10 engineers and designers are applying the skills they’ve learned in building social news apps. They’re starting with a whole new code base, essentially reconstructing Digg’s infrastructure to make the service far more efficient and affordable to run. They’re also surveying Digg’s community to get a better understanding of how people are consuming news and what they want from Digg.

What exactly will we see come August 1? We’re not quite sure, but we do know that the Digg brand will stay intact, the service will later fold in the News.me apps to make one big Digg product, it won’t just be a News.me clone, and Digg will most certainly be a work in progress.

“We hope that you will see the upcoming launch as the beginning, not the end. This is the beginning of a new generation for Digg — a restoration of what was brilliant and disruptive and a reinvention of what was not,” said the ambitious Betaworks bunch.

Photo credit: Shutterstock

Community news sharing site Digg is rumored to be in acquisition talks with the Washington Post and possibly others, sources familiar with the matter told VentureBeat.

Serious negotiations with the Washington Post have been going on almost a month, but Digg may have been seeking a potential buyer for the last three months, according to our sources.

Digg is also shopping itself to others, including CNN, sources say. Digg landing at CNN does make more sense, considering that the company is a bit more modern in its approach to online news sharing. CNN is no stranger to social news aggregation startups, as the company purchased mobile news magazine startup Zite back in August.

For those who aren’t familiar with Digg, it’s essentially a news aggregator that’s powered by users who both submit and vote on links to determine what’s the most popular. The site made a name for itself because of its ability to drive massive traffic to smaller, less publicized sites with good content, but no marketing budget.

However, Digg took a turn for the worse in August 2010, due in part to a rushed site revamp that angered many of its long-time active users, sending them rushing to Reddit for refuge. Digg’s traffic (as well as its ability to send traffic) never quite recovered from its peak, despite a handful of new and improved features.

Earlier this year the company launched a Facebook Timeline app, which gave Digg its highest traffic boost since 2010. Curiously, Digg also decided to kill off some of its publicly displayed tracking features for submitted posts — most notably the number of “eyeballs” a submission had. This could indicate that the site’s Facebook boost has peaked, or even started to disappear — neither of which is good when in the middle of acquisition talks.

TechCrunch is reporting that the sale to WaPo only includes Digg’s staff, but not the company’s technology or branding, which theoretically could still be purchased in a separate sale. I’m not really sure how much sense that would make though, considering that if you take Digg’s staff, who will be left to run the site? And as its been proven in the past, Digg’s strongest asset is its community — although less so today than four years ago. Why not just buy all of Digg at the same rate you’d be getting just the employees.

The rumor’s of Digg’s potential sale was first reported by The Next Web, which notes that the Washington Post is staying silent. We plan on following up with CNN and Digg for further comment about the situation, and will update the post with any new info.

Image via nComment

Think Digg is deader than a doornail? Think again. The news aggregation site is showing new signs of life and has Facebook to thank for its recent resuscitation.

Digg’s pageviews jumped 35 percent in January, and the struggling company saw its highest traffic numbers since October 2010, software engineer Will Larson said in a blog post Friday.

Why the sizable swell? Facebook, by way of the Digg Social Reader application, is bringing new readers to the site. In January, Facebook referral traffic was up by 67 percent, Larson indicated

In late December, the flailing startup introduced the Open Graph application, which is akin to the Washington Post Social Reader or the Yahoo Social Bar. Digg Social Reader stimulates story-sharing on Digg and on Facebook. Once installed, Facebook members can automatically share their Digg-reading activities with friends and subscribers on the social network. The application also hooks into Facebook Ticker and Timeline for more visibility.

The new blood is a much-needed infusion of hope for Digg. 2010 and 2011 were rocky years for the site that was once the angel of traffic for many a media company and blogger. Digg, which launched in 2004, quickly lost relevance with online news readers as Reddit swooped in to take its place. A poorly received redesign and the loss of its once revered leader seemed like sure signs that death was to become its doom.

Can Facebook help Digg forge a full-fledged comeback? The jury is still out, but the company is paying close attention to the reading behaviors of its newest Facebook fans.

“As compared to stories read on Digg (without Digg Social Reader turned on) — there are two main differences,” Larson detailed. “Entertainment stories were 14 percent of all stories read but less than 4 percent of those added to the Timeline. Likewise, political stories comprise less than two percent of those added to a user’s Timeline but close to 10 percent of what people read. The differences are significant enough to begin to predict a new type of reading behavior.”

And Digg is not alone in noticing the unique behaviors of Facebook readers. Yahoo, which introduced the Social Bar last year, has also seen a surge in new readership — especially in the highly coveted youth category — and is happily hitching its news product to Facebook to ride the wave back to relevancy.

Photo credit: Shutterstock

But perhaps more interesting than Buzz’s imminent death is the fact that Yahoo announced the service’s closing several weeks ago on April 4, but nobody seems to have noticed. It wasn’t until this morning that TechCrunch reported on the shutdown, and other than a few scattered press releases from Yahoo on the net, there doesn’t seem to be much earlier mention of Buzz’s passing.

There’s also a prominent announcement at the top of the main Buzz page, which I assume has been there for weeks and has also gone unnoticed.

That it took so long for anyone to recognize Buzz’s passing is more telling of Yahoo’s failures than the actual death of the service. Even in its heyday, when Buzz was sending obscene amounts of traffic to sites that were voted popular (mostly because those sites also appeared on Yahoo.com, one of the most trafficked sites on the Web), it still seemed no one but hardcore social news junkies was talking about it.

Buzz, which first launched in February 2009, is yet another potentially useful service that was squandered by Yahoo. That list includes Delicious, which Yahoo says it’s planning to sell off, and the social photo site Flickr, which somehow completely missed out on the mobile photo craze. Yahoo has already shuttered MyBlogLog, a service it bought for $10 million that let you create communities around your blogs.

Condé Nast, the owner of publications like tech magazine Wired and social news aggregation site Reddit, announced today it has raised a $500 million fund and brought in Andrew Siegel, a former Yahoo mergers and acquisitions expert, to help the publisher go on a shopping spree.

Condé Nast isn’t much of a stranger to trying out new forms of media. The publisher has been on the prowl for some new, defining media sources for several years now. Its flagship publication, Wired, launched an iPad version of its magazine earlier this year. It purchased the news aggregator site Reddit.com in 2006 as well, which has since exploded in popularity thanks to slipping traffic at rival site Digg.com.

With the success of upstart companies like Groupon that have essentially managed to generate completely new markets, it’s pretty clear why the publishing company would come topside and start looking for new revenue streams. There wasn’t any indication of what kind of companies Condé Nast was looking to pick up outside of a cryptic focus on “digital brands,” according to a report by All Things D. But with newcomers like Groupon spurning offers worth at least $6 billion, the publisher is probably going to be on the prowl for fresh, early-stage startups.

You can pretty much rule out news aggregation sites in that “digital brand” spectrum, though. After Condé Nast acquired Reddit in 2006, it became a bit reluctant to send additional resources to the site’s owners. The site as a result periodically experiences traffic overload and outages. To bypass Condé Nast’s frugal attitude, it began offering a premium subscription that had some additional features for a monthly fee.

Ben Huh, the mastermind behind the Cheezburger network that helped popularize some of the Internet’s most popular memes, even offered to buy the site at one point. Site founder Alexis Ohanian said he would be surprised if Condé Nast agreed to sell the site. But he said the two would chat at some point. It isn’t clear whether Condé Nast hasn’t found a way to monetize the Internet-savvy Reddit community, or if it simply has no interest.

“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 can display the mountains of real time Digg data pouring forth each second. “Our Streaming API provides any developer with full access to a real-time stream of all submissions, Diggs and comments occurring on our site,” he said.

The hope here is that new users will come to Digg in large numbers through outside applications. This would be similar to how Twitter found millions of new fans in early 2009 when it opened up its API, allowing programs such as Tweetie, Seesmic and Tweetdeck to create interfaces that were more useful than the actual Twitter site itself. Larson even mentioned Twitter in the announcement. “If you’ve used Twitter’s Streaming API then you already understand the opportunity that awaits. If not, we’re pretty sure that if you spend a few minutes playing around with the API that you’ll find your curiosity sparked.”

“The way Digg is positioning its API is similar to what Twitter did. You must remember that traffic skyrocketed there. It was traffic that was funneled through external applications so I think Digg is trying something similar here,” said Victor Barrera, social media strategist at Village Voice Media.

At least one developer said this is exactly what he’s been waiting for. Mohanraj Thirumalai, who is also known as longtime Digg power user “Lt. General Panda,” says he is happy the API feature has finally arrived so that he can continue building a site designed to attract fellow diggers. “Yes, I was waiting for this. Developers were given a hint about this already… I had personally presented (to Digg) several scenarios where I was stuck with the (previous) API and they had mentioned this upcoming feature (this stream) would ‘answer it all.’ And yes, it answers it all. I am working on a site and much of my work was stalled due to the absence of this feature. I can now go back to working on it… I here need to stress, as critical as I was recently about Digg, Digg staff have been very cooperative on this front.”

There is concern however about whether enough developers will be interested in the new streaming API in order for Digg’s popularity to rise after its recent botched redesign attempt. “It’s coming at a time when interest in Digg is at a low point and that is a problem,” said Barrera. “How much interest is there in the developer community overall? Probably not much yet. It may take time to build.”

“I think it’s obvious that Digg should be building every single connectivity tool they can as they build out their immediate API. These and other pro-active moves will give Digg time as they attempt to attract a new generation of diggers,” said content creator Cecil Helton.

Another downside that several Digg community members mention is stability of the site’s API as well as whether or not it can handle thousands of requests per minute. Twitter became notorious for not being able to handle the traffic increases it saw, and still presents its famous “fail whale” to visitors at times even now.

“Basically, Digg has had problems scaling in the past and this streaming API may make it even harder for them to stay online,” said Barrera. “It’s going to put extra stress on their servers for sure. They’re probably preparing themselves for growing pains there that they may experience.”

“The stability of the old API with respect to the new one is just like comparing Digg version 3 to Digg version 4. It’s not good,” said Thirumalai. “We often get internal errors, timeouts etc. However, the stream is implemented on a different base and once a connection is established it steadily flows. It is going to take some testing to exactly say if it is going to connect every single time.”

If Digg can get through those issues, the potential upside could be huge. “Ultimately if the new API leads to creative applications, new comments and digs, it will basically increase Digg’s visibility across the Web,” said Barerra. “If you don’t have to be on Digg to experience it, that’s a good thing for Digg.”

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 that we disappointed our Digg community in the process,” he wrote. “Thank you for your patience and your extremely candid feedback — we hear you loud and clear. In the next few weeks we’ll bring back the bury button, restore all user profiles (including comment and submission history), add filters and navigation for videos and images, provide a tool for users to report comment violations, and update the Top News algorithm and overall site design based upon your feedback.”

The last time someone higher up in the company talked to community members publicly, it was ex-CEO and site co-founder Kevin Rose, who tweeted out a survey last week designed to gauge the interest in possibly returning the “bury” button. As a longtime member of the community myself, I know that the move made a lot of core users happy that they had Rose’s ear. It also angered many of them, because they felt it was something the new CEO should have done.

Regardless of exactly who is doing the talking at the top, the fact that Digg’s top brass is listening to users has many members of the community pleased. “Matt Williams at least seems to understand the value of the ‘Digg community.’” said Victor Barrera, social media strategist for Village Voice Media. “Although he hasn’t been very vocal, he seems to be pushing the company in the right philosophical direction by encouraging user feedback. At this point in the game, Digg is looking to piece together its empire one loyal user at a time.”

That will be an uphill battle though. The redesign attempt, new site navigation as well as frequently-occurring glitches in late August and throughout September left a large portion of the community dissatisfied enough to leave and head for greener pastures, including competitor Reddit.

There are also ongoing concerns from publishers and others who leverage the Digg community to bring page views to their sites. Many publishers still report lethargic or inconsistent referral totals. In the past Digg has mentioned tighter publisher relationships as part of what it is hoped will bring money to the company and a return on the investment of those who have funded it over the last five years. The Washington Post and other large publications have never made it secret that they relied on Digg referrals to help them reach traffic goals.

“Look, Digg referrals aren’t as consistently high as they once were,” said Amy Vernon, director of viral marketing strategies for BlueGlass Interactive. “There are so many other places people can go to to find cool content that didn’t exist at Digg’s height. But referrals are still generally solid — and, more importantly, Digg’s authority is still high and so it carries significant weight in search.”

As for the return of the ‘bury’ feature to the site, not everyone is happy. “Personally, I do not want the bury button back because most people use it to bury stories they just don’t agree with or like,” said a longtime user with the moniker ‘BeShirtHappy.’ “There needs to be moderators, maybe, to keep the spam off the top news, but not a bury button. It will be misused.”

Others like the return of older features because they may make the site feel more stable, which is important for bringing back those who left. However, it’s going to be a slow process building back user trust. “Basically it comes down to, the more stable Digg gets, the more traffic they will see in the short term and the long term,” said Barrera.

Other improvements may help bring people back. Williams pointed out that the site’s numbers appear decent on the surface. There were still 23 million unique visitors in September. He also highlighted site speed improvements: “Digg today is a much faster web site, operating on an open source platform.”

In this economy, it doesn’t come as a surprise that NPR saw a need to make some cuts -– amounting to $23 million -– despite reaching what it said is a near-record audience of 26.4 million listeners a week. NPR execs cite a drop in corporate sponsorships, which the company relies on for about a third of its revenue, to a projected $33 million for the year instead of the $47 million budgeted.

The two West-coast-based cancelled shows, both of which sought to diversify NPR’s audience, will go off the air on March 20, and 22 journalists working for them will lose their jobs, including hosts Madeleine Brand and Farai Chideya.

NPR is a popular fixture in the tech community. Aside from its popularity on iTunes, its election Twitter account attracted over 14,000 followers and its political and fact-checking stories are frequently bookmarked on Digg.

[photo: flickr/aloshbennett]

More significantly, the changes appear to be a direct response to Facebook, which has exploited its sharing features to tremendous success, and has also talked about using it to become a news site.

Digg’s new features are explained in this video.

Digg joins an increasing number of companies incorporating Facebook’s popular “feed” concept, where users can track the activities of their friends. This tends to create more activity on the site, because friends are likely to click on stories liked by their friends. This is particular important for Digg, which depends on its users to read and endorse stories, and so it’s a prudent, obvious move. On the one hand, it makes it easier for cliques of people to conspire to jointly endorse a story — something that has plagued Digg because marketers have a strong interest in pushing their own stories to the front page. On the other, it may generate more legitimate activity and thus help the community override that nefarious activity.

You can hit “share” and then “shout” to send a message to friends about articles you like. You can select favorites, that put your favorite articles on your profile. Your profile also shows the latest ten things you’ve done, comments you’ve made, shouts, and friends you’ve made. The profile has all sorts of information including age, name, picture, location, favorites sties, an about section, personal photos, and then your friends’ activities — just like Facebook. You can customize it all with filters.

Digg will notify you via email when certain activities happen, such as when someone adds you as a friend or a story you submit becomes popular. You can control what emails you want to receive in the email settings section of your user profile. You can find your friends’ profiles on Digg by searching for them by their email address. If you don’t want to enable others to search for your profile, you can specify that in privacy settings.