Social news aggregator Nuzzel has secured its first round of funding just a few months after its launch.

Jonathan Abrams’ startup pulls together relevant news from your feed and delivers it to you on a dashboard and in daily email. Abrams is the cofounder of social network Friendster. Read more about Nuzzel’s launch.

Invited to join the beta? Sign in via Twitter, and the site will immediately get to work aggregating news stories that your friends are posting and commenting on.

The majority of the people I follow work in tech, so the top stories include Priceline’s purchase of Kayak and Bravo’s polarizing Silicon Valley reality TV show. However, Nuzzel has a “news you may have missed” section, which displays stories shared by an extended network on a broad variety of topics.

Until today, Abrams had built the site single-handedly, and he did not receive any external investment. The idea for the site had been brewing for several years — Abrams told me he often turns to Twitter as a source of tech news.

Clearly, he had no trouble pulling in funds for the startup; Abrams currently runs Founders Den, an elite co-working space in San Francisco alongside Zachary Bogue of Data Collective. Bogue was one of over a dozen seed investors in Nuzzel’s first round.

Trash (n): Discarded matter; refuse.

In our story, the word trash refers to two subjects: Digg.com itself, and the community of people who contributed to its rise and fall. The former was discarded, practically given away, to Betaworks over the summer. Six weeks later, the community was also dumped by the wayside when the new owners released their unique interpretation on social news.

Not surprisingly, Digg’s former power users are underwhelmed by Betaworks’ machination, peeved that identities crafted over the course of eight years vanished from the web. But Digg’s new landlords did more than abandon former tenants: They erected an experience that downplays the value of the digg. They replaced the often-abused button with a “thumbs up” icon that actually has little to do with the formula for determining featured content.

“Essentially, it’s an entirely new experience,” Altimeter Group analyst Brian Solis told me. “This bears, to me, very little resemblance to the model and culture of [the old] Digg.”

What’s in a digg?

He’s right. The curious observer will notice that now Digg’s top stories, the articles with the highest billing on the homepage, don’t typically have the highest scores. The same observer may scratch her head at the discovery and ponder, “What makes this a top story?”

“I can’t tell you how they choose their stories these days, because I’m not really clear on the process. It’s certainly not the way it used to be,” former Digg power user Andrew Sorcini told me.

Known to Diggers as “MrBabyMan,” Sorcini actively used the social news site from 2005 until 2010, when Digg released a controversial version (version 4) that repelled many of its most ardent fans. Sorcini held the number one spot on Digg’s leader board at one point.

The old process of story promotion, as Sorcini described it, had a lot to do with diversity. The total number of diggs certainly factored into a story’s rise, but Digg also employed an algorithm that considered diggs generating from different geographical regions, the time of day, and user status. “The more organic and diverse the diggs … the more likely the story would be promoted,” Sorcini said.

Still, it was an algorithmically-managed system. There wasn’t much editorial selection involved in story promotion, Sorcini said.

Puzzled, this inquisitive reporter decided to find out what makes a story bubble up to the top of the new Digg. That’s because the new Digg seems to be uncovering a panoply of articles that I actually want to read.

I was never much of a fan of the original Digg. But I’ve gravitated to the fresh, white-washed, people-less, and clean Digg.com like a news junky in need of a fix. I get my fix and return each day for more, most often using the iPhone application for quick and easy reads.

I’m not alone.

“As a consumer of information, I appreciate its simplicity and its elegance in that simplicity,” Solis said of the new service. He sees the new Digg as a cross between Techmeme and Pinterest in terms of functionality and presentation.

The Digg of yore repelled me, but this new, foreign thing is inviting. Gone are the noise, trolls, traffic-gamers, spammers, gnarly comment threads, and negativity. Here instead I find a single, compelling voice speaking for the Internet at large.

Digg’s new team, which includes a few moderators who watch social data to determine where a story should live on the homepage.

But whose voice am I — are we — listening to?

Digg’s general manager, Jake Levine, explained it to me — partially.

“The top stories section is powered by a mix of social and behavioral data sources,” Levine told me. “It’s up to the Digg moderators to sit on top of this data, organize it, and then present the most talked about stories on the web.”

Sources, said Levine, include Facebook, Bit.ly, News.me, Twitter, Chartbeat (a tool online publishers use to track hot stories), and last but not least, diggs. The exact formula isn’t for public consumption, he said.

You’d be right in observing that Digg’s new formula is even more altered than its look. Today, the Digg user has little say in selecting or burying top stories, while in-house moderators play God.

There’s no point to having a “digg” button on the site, Solis said, because the concept of a digg, or the ability to push a story forward by voting for it, has been done away with entirely. The new Digg, he said, feels like it’s taking the pulse of a social web instead of relying on a community of active and invested people to go out and find the best content.

Today’s Digg user does not receive credit for submissions, points for repeat activity, or any status for activity whatsoever.

A tabula rasa

Ask Levine and you’ll learn that Betaworks intentionally wiped away the community aspect to rid the site of spam, the very problem that drove Sorcini away in 2010.

Digg suffered from two types of spam: regular spam, the kind that clogs your email junk folder; and marketing spam, or content that wasn’t very interesting to the community but was artificially promoted by news outlets or marketing firms hired by publishers. Digg’s 2010 Version 4 treated the concept of publishers promoting their own content as a positive attribute, and that resulted in marketing or SEO-optimized articles hitting the front page far too frequently for power users’ tastes.

“Digg handed the site over to publishing interests and other promotional partners,” Sorcini said of version 4, which was released to widespread criticism in August 2010. “[Digg] made it difficult for individual content curators to be able to curate stories and have them be voted on.”

Early mock-ups of Digg v1

In erasing the community, Betaworks gave itself a tabula rasa to start from.

“Regarding the community: Digg had a major spam/abuse problem when we took it over,” Levine said. “There were some really great people using the old Digg, but they were totally crowded out by spammers and marketers who cared more about making a buck than promoting a healthy community.

“The site we built in six weeks did two things: It restored a great discovery experience, and it eliminated the spam problem.”

Digg’s new owners have committed to adding people back into the mix in some way.

“Now we turn to the next big problem: opening up channels for participation without welcoming back spammers and marketers,” Levine told me. “We want to live up to what Digg was at its best, we just need to rethink what that means for a web that looks a lot different.”

Digg, the dinosaur

Too little, too late?

Sorcini said he probably won’t return to Digg, even though he appreciates the absence of spam.

“If you had asked me a couple of years ago, I would have said yes,” he told me.

“I think, in a way, Digg, and even Reddit, are dinosaurs as far as user-generated sites go. I think that the trend is leaning more toward sites like Pinterest and Twitter and Facebook. There’s almost no need for one individual site that you go to to get content. The content lives in your own personal space, like Facebook or Twitter.”

Solis spoke about the same shift in news consumption habits as the new Digg’s biggest obstacle.

“In a world where BuzzFeed is getting so much attention, I wonder if this is enough,” he said. He sees Digg’s future as an editorial property and questioned whether it could stand out from Twitter and Facebook, which offer people a “good enough” stream of news items to choose from. “There are a million places to go to get content.”

But Levine pointed me to early evidence that Digg is doing just fine — better than expected, actually. Apparently, 4 million people have checked out the site since relaunch. And after discounting version 4′s bogus visitors, Digg’s traffic has actually increased since the relaunch, Levine said. Like me, it seems, some people actually like the more curated approach to the day’s news.

“We’re hearing from more and more people that Digg is becoming a daily source of news for them, and from publishers that it’s becoming a traffic source again,” Levine said.

Proof that one person’s trash can be another’s treasure.

VentureBeat writer Tom Cheredar contributed to the reporting of this story.

Photo credits: Digg

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.

The Bay Area-based startup has a long road ahead if it plans to topple Google’s popular web-based news aggregator, and with this iPad release, to compete with Pulse, Flipboard and the like. But the timing may be just right.

Founder and chief executive, Samuel Clay, who recently graduated from accelerator program, Y Combinator, saw a golden opportunity when Google announced a somewhat flawed strategy to remove all the “social” features from Google Reader, including friending, following and shared link blogs, to support the expansion of Google+.

Clay figured people still wanted those social features, and he had a way to provide them.

Newsblur’s founder, Samuel Clay

“You can subscribe to friends and people you admire on NewsBlur,” said Clay. “It’s all about sharing the news you read.”

On NewsBlur’s iPhone and iPad apps, you’re prompted to import your feed from Google Reader and then to subscribe to your extended friend network on Twitter and Facebook. For Clay, these social features are the basis of how we consume the news.

The service also lets you curate good reads for your “blurblog,” another strong social component. Friends can peruse your favorite stories on your blurblog and gauge your reactions to hot stories.

The core features of the new iPad app will also be available on the iPhone app. They include:

• Easy browsing of your favorite news sites, folders, and friend’s blurblogs
• Near-instant downloading of news stories
• Visible comments on stories via your blurblog
• Integration with Google Reader
• Blurblogs are now incorporated in your feed list

The web-based service and apps would benefit from a designer, but this is impressive considering that it’s been a one or two-man operation from the outset (Clay had a friend come on board this summer to assist with the development of the iPad app).

Clay told me he developed the first iteration of the product back in 2009 during the morning and evening train ride from Brooklyn to New York. During the 90-minute commute, he hacked a feed reader for his personal consumption. ”I was working in the news space and was dissatisfied,” he told me. “Like any good hacker, I built my own.”

After quitting his day job to work on the product full-time, he was selected as a solo founder for Y Combinator — a rare feat. But no man is an island — Clay plans to raise a first round of funding in the coming months, which he’ll use to build a core team of developers and designers.

NewsBlur is available as a freemium product. Free users can read up to 64 feeds. Paying subscribers can add an unlimited number of feeds. For developers, NewsBlur offers an API and the source code is also available on Github.

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

The Washington Post’s social advertising firm SocialCode has hired 15 engineers from Digg today, confirming rumors last week that the community news site was due for a shakeup.

Digg entered into serious negotiations with the Washington Post about selling the entire company nearly a month ago, as VentureBeat previously reported. However, it looks like the post was only interested in the site’s talent, leaving its brand name and underlying social news aggregation technology still available for a sale. Digg was also reportedly pitching the sale of the company to other big news publications, such as CNN.

The SocialCode firm is dedicated to helping advertisers create communities out of their social media following — something the Digg engineers are quite familiar with. As part of the talent deal, the former Digg employees will assume leadership roles at SocialCode. The company’s VP of Ad products Alan Lippman will assume the position of chief scientist at SocialCode, while software dev Will Larson will become SocialCode’s director of engineering.

It’s worth noting that the Washington Post didn’t poach Digg’s staff. The move was endorsed this morning by the startup’s CEO Matt Williams in a blog post, which means Digg is on its way to getting completely dismantled. Without engineers, we probably won’t be seeing any new features on the site or integration with other services. Essentially, Digg’s days are numbered.

Image illustration by Tom Cheredar

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

The social news-reader Flud isn’t just for iOS fans anymore: the company recently launched both Android and Windows Phone apps. And now, it’s planning to raise up to $8 million in a new round of funding.

Like competitors Pulse and Taptu, Flud is a fun way to keep track of your news (and it’s a bit of a looker too). But unlike the other apps, Flud is building up a social network of its own for news junkies, instead of just relying on Facebook and Twitter. You can create a profile, follow others, and directly share news to those following you. Basically, it’s a lot like the hot photo-sharing app Instagram, except with a focus on news.

“When you give people a profile in a specialized network so they can share content with each other, you start to see interesting things in interaction,” Flud co-founder and CEO Bobby Ghoshal told VentureBeat in an interview.

Flud lets you share stories on Twitter and Facebook, but Ghoshal tells me users are 600 percent more likely to “Flud” news and share with their followers. The company updated its platform and iOS app to function more as a social network back in December, but now users on other platforms will get their chance.

Ghoshal says the company is also working on launching a web app next month — so you’ll be able to use Flud for news outside of your mobile device. The company also recently updated its iPad app to take advantage of the new iPad’s Retina Display.

Flud initially launched an Android app back in August, but the company had to pull it a month later because of a variety of issues. “We ended up screwing that up a bit,” Ghoshal said. But the company has come back even stronger with its new Android app after working closely with Google. Similarly, Flud tapped Microsoft for help when developing its Windows Phone app.

San Diego, Calif.-based Flud is now working on raising between $5 million and $8 million in a first round of funding. The company doesn’t have many details to share on that round yet, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see some participation from its seed investors (who put in $1 million) Scott Belsky, Detroit Venture Partners, and Ludlow Ventures.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Pulse has gone from college project to social news powerhouse in two years’ time. Friday, the blossoming business is taking a leap forward by going local.

Pulse, made by startup Alphonso Labs, has launched Pulse Local to provide application users on smartphones and tablets with local news, sports, food content, and deals, all sourced from third-party partners such as CBS Local News, Patch, Bleacher Report, Zagat, Groupon, and LivingSocial.

Pulse is a news-reading application for consuming and sharing content from a variety of social feeds and publishers. It competes with Flipboard and a smattering of similarly purposed apps, such as Zite. The application first launched in 2010 on the iPad, and is now available for iPhone, iPad, Android, Kindle Fire, and Nook, has become ubiquitous and touts 13 million users who read upwards of 200 million stories each month.

The local play will provide the application’s growing user base with even more quality content to browse in an aesthetically pleasing mobile environment. It may also establish a viable revenue stream for the young company.

“We’ve been working on this for the last six months,” co-founder Akshay Kothari told VentureBeat. “It clearly creates a very personal experience.”

People can now open the application and find local content from a variety of sources across four different categories: news, sports, food, and deals. CBS Local News and Patch are the two largest providers of local news, but smaller publishers such as The Bold Italic and Gothamist have a place inside Pulse, as well. This the first third-party distribution deal for Patch, the local news network from AOL, Kothari said.

Local deals from Groupon, LivingSocial, and Gilt are designed to be revenue-generating content. Kothari wouldn’t disclose exact terms of Pulse’s relationship with deal providers, but did say that his company is earning revenue in two different ways: for deals bought by way of Pulse and for new subscribers acquired through Pulse.

Pulse’s revenue-oriented relationships with deal partners may foreshadow future money-making opportunities. The application hinges around content provided by more than 250 partner publishers, Kothari said, and while these deals have been entirely centered around distribution, talks with publishers have started to progress to include discussions on monetizing traffic.

“We want to keep a focus on content,” Kothari said. “Even when we think about commerce, we really want to focus on how we can connect really interesting content to commerce. Advertising should not feel like advertising. It should be engaging content that people want to engage with.”

Palo Alto-based Alphonso Labs has 20 employees and has raised north of $10 million for Pulse.

Steal from the best, but make it your own, as the saying goes. Facebook has done just that by co-opting two concepts made popular by others in an effort to make its social network the first place people go to consume the news they care about.

Facebook introduced a new feature called Interest Lists on Thursday as a way for members to turn the site into their own personalized newspaper, featuring only the sections of their choosing. The lists are an intelligent hybrid of Twitter’s list feature and the social news movement, popularized by Flipboard and others.

Interest Lists, created and named by people for people, are topic-themed collections of Pages and public figures on Facebook, and are akin to specialized news feeds for your favorite topics. The company has categorized lists in mostly traditional sections such as News, Music, Business, Sports, Politics, Lifestyle, and Entertainment, with the idea being that they will comprise the sections of your Facebook newspaper.

Interest Lists are yet another extension of Facebook’s Subscribe feature, introduced last September. They live on the left-hand side of the page for easy one-click access. If a story within a particular Interest List you subscribe to is seeing a lot of engagement, however, Facebook will push that story to your News Feed. Recent stories from Interest Lists may be also highlighted in the News Feed on occasion.

The feature is pure genius — even if it does take inspiration from Twitter. Here’s why: Facebook users can either package up the celebrities or things they care about into convenient little buckets, or they can let friends, strangers, and media organizations do the dirty work for them and just happily consume the curated content as it rolls out. And because Facebook appears to have recruited partners to seed lists for its new toy, there’s already a smattering of top-notch lists across a variety of categories just itching to be subscribed to on day-one.

Then there’s the journalist and media crowd. Both groups will love Interest Lists because they promise more exposure for their stories, more subscribers, more traffic, and new audiences that could become regular readers. I’ve previously called Subscribe a gift for publishers and journalists because it’s the ultimate in self-promotion tools. Following that logic, Interest Lists is the gift that keeps on giving. The lists are cyclical in nature. Facebookers ad you or your publication to a list, your personalities and stories net larger audiences, those audiences subscribe to the lists in question, and the cycle repeats itself. There’s also the opportunity for publications to play curator for their readers.

As for Facebook, the Interest Lists are absolutely a home run. Interest Lists have the promise of better distributing Facebook content to the social network’s 845 million monthly active users. More content, that people have an expressed interest in, means users will spend even more time on Facebook, and share, “like,” comment, and engage more, activities that will distribute content farther and wider. Engagement and time spent on site are bottom-line metrics that will eventually translate into more advertising dollars as businesses pump money into Facebook’s enhanced ad-products to draw the attention of these captive eyeballs.

The real kicker is that Facebook’s social newspaper experience, unlike the myriad of apps toying with the same notion, works independently of a person’s platform. On web, mobile, PC, or tablet? No matter. It’s just Facebook, so the experience stays the same and you can continue to get your news sections uninterrupted wherever you are. And because Facebook has made the lists an integrated part of the standard experience, users who forget about visiting sections will still be exposed to list content. The same can’t be said of Twitter’s lists.

Kudos, Facebook.

Photo credit: arvindgrover/Flickr

“Social is now the ‘newswire,’ the go-to place for important information and edgy discussion,” an MSN spokesperson told VentureBeat. “We created msnNOW so people can cut through the clutter and quickly filter through the overwhelming amount of information streaming on the Web to find out what’s hot, and why.”

By taking out the human editing element and using a program to choose topics based entirely on their popularity with the general public, msnNOW runs into an interesting problem: It turns out the general public is interested in total crap.

The site, now.msn.com, rotates through four stories on top, with well-written headlines such as “Creepy site links rich guys, co-eds” and “Halle Berry’s new movie stars sharks but still seems boring.” To the right of that carousel is a list of top trending keywords, called Biggest Movers, that’s updated every five minutes. The bottom half of the page is a grid of other trending stories that can be filtered by five topics: Fame, Cash, Sweat, Soul, and Wire. The categories seem to be loosely defined, with Bar Refaeli jumping on a trampoline filed under Sweat.

The technology behind the site is a custom tool called Demand Dashboard that MSN’s developers spent a year creating.

“It does all the work to bring together what’s emerging online in real-time and identifies acceleration of trends that are becoming more viral. Specifically, it identifies the topic’s strength based on total volume or acceleration,” explained the spokesperson. The Demand Dashboard then takes the information it collects on a trend and pushes it down the production line to an editorial team for publication.

What’s especially brilliant on the part of MSN is that each story doesn’t link back to the original site, but to another msnNOW page with an image and a 100-word summary of the trend written by one of MSN’s 20 editors. Videos are embedded above the summary, and there are in-text links back to tweets, local news coverage, or Facebook posts. Once you gulp down the bite-sized nugget of information you came for, you’ll be tempted by delicious-looking links to related stories that cover the page. You might be sucked into a never-ending loop of viral news.

Currently, there are no ads on the site, but that will change in a few months when the plan is to make revenue off of advertising and sponsorships. “Once we are very clear of how people are interacting and experiencing with msnNOW, we will offer advertising experiences that are both useful and beneficial for consumers and advertisers.”

The new site already acts as fascinating view into our collective Id. We are all horrible people wasting time at work, and I totally clicked on the headline “Adele song helps a bulldog through some dark times.” The public’s insatiable appetite for dessert content is a problem online journalists are intimately familiar with. You can spend a week on a serious and deeply reported story, but a slideshow about cats bonding with antelopes will rake in the traffic.

I am confident msnNOW will be a hit, since it’s a nicely designed aggregator of other hits. That doesn’t mean it can’t make me sad for humanity. And that sadness does mean I can’t bookmark it and visit a few times a day.

“Cristian Strat and Mircea Pasoi have created a product that curates the best and most important stories in your Twitter timeline and Facebook newsfeed,” a Twitter spokesperson told VentureBeat in an e-mail. “Cristian and Mircea and their team of three engineers will join our Growth team and explore ways to help people connect and engage with relevant, timely news.”

Summify’s product truncates your social media and various reader feeds into hourly newsletters showing you only the information it believes you are interested in. The company’s technology looks at who you follow, what your friends like, and where you get your news to decide what content is most compelling for your newsletters. These little bites of social information can be accessed through e-mail, your browser or your iPhone.

The product direction seems to fit well into Twitter’s overall vision. Twitter too is in the business of truncating. That is, taking what would have otherwise been 200-word posts and convincing people to state the opinion in 140 characters.

“As hundreds of millions of people worldwide are signing up and consuming Twitter, we realized it’s the best platform to execute our vision at a truly global scale,” said the team in a blog post.

But becoming part of Twitter’s “Growth team” means Summify is closing down its aggregator to focus on more tweet-friendly projects. According to Summify, subscribers believe the company “found a magical solution to a truly unsolved problem.” A solution Summify says it is “streamlining,” or cutting down little by little, for an easier transition into Twitter.

As of today, new registrations are being cut off, while existing Summify users will have regular access to their newsletters. Summify is also ending “public” newsletters option, as well as profile pages, influence pages, and the auto-publish feature. E-mailed summaries will be first to go in a couple weeks. Subscribers will still be able to get their social news from the website and iPhone notifications.

As a sign of a good product, customers are already beginning to complain in comments of the blog post. Many are happy for the company, but are sad to see their resource fall away. One commenter described the feeling as “shocked.”

Twitter would not comment on how the technology will be used, or if this was purely a talent acquisition.

Summify was founded in Romania and moved to Vancouver after being accepted into incubator Bootup Labs. The company employees will be relocating to Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters. Investors include Accel Partners, Capital West Partners, co-founder of FeedBurner Steve Olechowski, and more.

He is joining the company as the “lead cloud reliability” engineer — a prod at the company’s recent history of infrequent downtimes — he announced on his Twitter account. Edberg also indicated that the “cloud reliability” team was hiring.

Edberg recently left Reddit after working at the site for 4 years to pursue personal projects, though he didn’t indicate what he would be doing at the time.

Edberg joined Reddit when it first started, along with co-founders Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman and site engineer Chris Slowe. He served as the site’s “Information Cowboy,” which involved serving as the site’s systems admin as well as handling a hodgepodge of outreach, public relations and general hellraising. While working at Reddit, he joined Tracy Lee as an advisor to social food discovery site Dishcrawl.

That left Ohanian as the last original member of the Reddit team still contributing to the site. Ohanian had earlier left Reddit to pursue his own projects, which included flight search company Hipmunk and advocating for the startup incubator Y Combinator on the east coast. But he returned to his roots recently — like another prodigal son founder, Jack Dorsey, who  returned to the company that ballooned in valuation after he left.

Reddit’s user base grew exponentially due to a mass exodus from rival news aggregator Digg. That site decided to kill a number of popular features, sparking outrage among its members. Traffic research firm Quantcast indicates that Digg now has 8.2 million unique visitors, down from nearly 16 million unique visitors in August before the latest version of Digg was released. Reddit boasts nearly 19 million unique visitors.

Reddit is owned by media giant Conde Nast, and has about 10 employees working from San Francisco, New York, Salt Lake City and Los Angeles.

Edberg joined the company when it first started with co-founders Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman and site engineer Chris Slowe. He served as the site’s “Information Cowboy,” which involved serving as the site’s sys admin as well as handling a hodgepodge of outreach, public relations and general hellraising. While working at Reddit, he joined Tracy Lee as an advisor to social food discovery site Dishcrawl. He indicated that he would continue working with Lee on Dishcrawl in his official blog post about his departure today.

That leaves Ohanian as the last original member of the Reddit team on the site. Ohanian also left the site to pursue his own projects, which included flight search company Hipmunk and advocating for the startup incubator Y Combinator on the east coast. But he returned to his roots recently — like another prodigal son founder, Jack Dorsey, who  returned to the company that ballooned in valuation after he left.

Reddit brought on another systems administrator, Jason Harvey, back in February. He’ll be filling Edberg’s role while they search for another full-time employee to permanently take the spot, said Reddit’s Erik Martin.

Edberg didn’t specify what his next gig would be, but he fired off a number of personal pet projects he has been involved in while working at Reddit, including One Year Labs and Dishcrawl.

Reddit’s user base grew exponentially due to a mass exodus from rival news aggregator Digg. That site decided to kill a number of popular features, sparking outrage among its members. Traffic research firm Quantcast indicates that Digg now has 8.2 million unique visitors, down from nearly 16 million unique visitors in August before the latest version of Digg was released. Reddit boasts nearly 19 million unique visitors.

Reddit has about 10 employees working from San Francisco, New York, Salt Lake City and Los Angeles.

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.

“At this point in my career, I want to work at a place where the programmers go all the way to the top, where the policies coming from HR and IT and everyone else are designed with nerds in mind, not magazine publishers,” Schiraldi said in his last post to the Reddit Blog.

As for what constitutes a dream offer from a company that ranks among the best in keeping their employees happy, Schiraldi told me he’s going to err on the side of caution and stay silent until he finds out from Google what he can and cannot say about his new position.

Obviously he’d be qualified to add Reddit-like features to Google’s own news gathering services. Regardless, it will be interesting to see what he can do under a management that supports and encourages his talents.

Schiraldi, who joined the staff in late 2008, is perhaps best known for his bold appeal to Reddit users for help when the site’s massive growth began outpacing available resources. Parent company Condé Nast made it clear that Reddit needed to produce higher revenue to justify hiring more employees and buying additional servers. Meanwhile, Reddit’s small team of four employees poured all their efforts into keeping the site from crashing instead of building new features that could make them more profitable.

Not content with being punished for their success, Schiraldi wrote a brutally honest assessment of their predicament and debuted Reddit Gold Subscriptions as a possible solution. Users provided the funds necessary under the promise that exclusive features would be added for gold subscribers when they were feasible.

Predictably, Condé Nast’s feathers were ruffled and Schiraldi probably took some heat, but overall the gutsy move paid off. The site has more than doubled its traffic since launching Reddit Gold — pushing over a billion page views in January alone.

“The one silver lining to this is that Raldi’s departure really opened up Condé’s eyes to what our needs are as a site that is different from all the other properties at Condé Nast,” said Reddit Operations Manager Jeremy Edberg in a comment thread. He added that they had just wrapped up a meeting with Condé Nast President Bob Sauerberg, who pledged additional resources, more funding and the approval to hire a larger number of employees than originally planned.

For now it seems the Condé Nast management shake up under Sauerberg’s direction, which moved the Reddit employees higher up in the management chain, is proving to be a very successful stride in the right direction.

Image via Gaelach

Digg’s chief revenue officer, Chas Edwards, confirmed his departure to AllThingsD, in a move he and the company sought to cast as voluntary. But much speculation surrounded the timing of his exit. Edwards, even before he joined the company, was the architect of Digg’s monetization strategy. At Federated Media, an online advertising agency which represented Digg, Edwards helped sign up top-tier advertisers for the site. Digg lured Edwards away as it attempted to bring more sales in-house.

At Digg, Edwards headed an internal sales team that focused on selling embedded ads that looked very similar to stories submitted by the community on Digg’s popular front page and elsewhere on the site. The ads were a big hit among community members. These popular ads disappeared from the site for much of the time that Digg redesigned its site in late August.

Edwards is joining a photo-labeling startup, Pixazza, as chief revenue officer. Digg’s longtime CFO, John Moffett, has also left the company for another startup, Vizu.

Some Digg community members speculated afterward that the severing of the relationship with Edwards was an attempt to scapegoat him for the loss of revenue that the company may have experienced after the botched redesign attempt, which is widely believed to have hurt Digg’s traffic and community participation levels. It’s an open question whether these layoffs would have been necessary had the redesign not been attempted in the first place.

Williams did not say which departments would be cut. A company spokeswoman promised more announcements Tuesday.

Digg’s most active community members have strong feelings about the site, which many rely on to drive traffic to websites they work for.

While the move towards profitability was greeted with hope by some, other Digg users expressed concern because of what some see as a decreased focus on quality of headlines on the site. In the last several weeks, dozens of “spam” sites have appeared on the front page, without Digg staff noticing.

“I could see it getting them to the point of profitability next year, but at what cost to the community and product if they don’t have the staff to stay on top of things?” said Cass P. Andersen, online marketing manager for Guyism.com.

Rose said that looking back, he would have hired additional engineers to handle implementing new advertising features instead, in comments made at an interview at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco..

Digg recently launched a suite of new features, most of which constituted playing catch-up, Rose said. Collectively known as Digg v4, or the fourth version of the site, they’re aimed at moving Digg to a more social and personalized experience. The Digg community largely lashed out at the team after the new version of Digg went live, with some users apparently flocking to its competitor Reddit, a social-news site owned by magazine publisher Condé Nast.

Rose said the site probably should have introduced the new features slowly over time and maintained popular old features until users completely migrated to the new version.

It’s unclear whether Rose’s future plans involve Digg. Rose has become increasingly active as an angel investor, putting money into companies like Foursquare and Gowalla. He also dodged questions from TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington as to whether he would be at Digg by the end of the year. And while Rose has turned down acquisition offers as high as $80 million to continue working with the site at his investors’ insistence, he said even he is a little burnt out working on the site.

“Emotionally it’s tough when you go through this crazy growth and a bunch of acquisition offers,” he said. “I like to ship product and roll out new features, when you can’t do that it’s really frustrating.”

Rose launched the news aggregator site in 2004, which has since grown to a team of about 60 and around 1.2 million daily page views, he said. Rose has always shied away from being a direct leader of Digg, instead hiring Jay Adelson (who later got the boot) and most recently Amazon.com’s Matt Williams to take the helm of the site. The San Francisco, Calif.-based company has raised around $40 million to date.

On the heels of former CEO Jay Adelson’s departure in April, news aggregator Digg will reportedly announce former online retailer Amazon.com executive Matt Williams as its new boss today.

Founder Kevin Rose ran the company as an interim CEO as the company, known for its crowdsourcing strategy of letting users pick its headlines, overhauled the site to take a more social approach. While some applauded the new site, many users led a typically whimsical revolt in protest of the new design.

Digg has faced a host of problems since the launch of the redesigned website, including having to freeze user submissions to the site — long the core of Digg’s identity — on Monday.

Digg’s also dealt with its fair share of problems aside from the redesign. It cut 10 percent of its staff shortly after Adelson’s departure. And it faced criticism after users and publishers were discovered gaming the site to direct traffic to websites they preferred and creating “Digg armies” to kill stories they did not want to reach the front page.

Williams, the former general manager of consumer payments at Amazon.com, will take the reigns as Rose resumes his role as chief architect of the site, TechCrunch reports.

We’ve reached out to confirm the details and will update as they come in.

[Photo: smemon87]

Following the hubbub around Condé Nast’s refusal to run ads supporting California’s Proposition 19 — which would legalize certain marijuana-related activities — comes an offer to buy the site from the unlikeliest of sources.

Ben Huh (pictured below), the man who helped popularize Lolcats (those omnipresent cat pictures with funny captions) with the blog I Can Has Cheezburger?, offered to buy Reddit via a post on The Daily What (yet another site on his network).

The letter reads as follows:

Hi TDWers, I’m Ben Huh, and I run the Cheezburger Network (which includes The Daily What, if you were too Prop 19’d to notice). I have made this offer privately to a few people associated with Reddit, and I’ll say it publicly now:

I believe that Reddit is one of the best communities I have seen on the Internet. I also believe that Reddit would benefit from more resources and less corporate interference. We can offer all of the above. And we’d love to buy Reddit and all those pesky troublesome users that we love so much.

Condé, we’ll be waiting for a call.

After purchasing I Can Has Cheezburger? in 2007, Huh went on to make internet memes his specialty by creating the Cheezburger Network, a collection of similarly irreverent and funny sites like Fail Blog and The Daily What. Pet Holdings, Huh’s Seattle-based startup, is the holding and parent company of the Cheezburger Network.

In a Time feature last year, it was clear that Huh’s network was no flop. “Pet Holdings managed to haul in seven figures from advertising, licensing fees and merchandise sales during the first six months of this year, according to a report given to Huh’s investors,” writes Time’s Laura Fitzpatrick. In July 2009, the network grabbed 10.4 million unique visitors. By May 2010, that number jumped to 16 million visitors, according to the New York Times, which reported data from the analytics firm Quantcast.

Huh certainly has the means and will to purchase Reddit, and he’s the sort of owner the Reddit community would be less prone to revolt against. He maintained that he’s “totally serious about buying Reddit” and that it “would do better under a strange and weird start-up like us, rather than a corporate giant like Conde Nast,” when asked for comment by TechCrunch.

Condé Nast purchased Reddit in 2006 via Wired Digital, but the news site revealed recently that it was unable to convince Nast to send more resources its way. The site began testing a premium membership last month, dubbed Reddit Gold, that would allow diehard fans to gain access to certain features, and generate more money for the site in the process.

Top image via I Can Has Cheezburger?

Instead of using the online ad space to generate revenues, Condé Nast is now facing an army of “Redditors,” as the site’s active participants are known, placing what amounts to free advertising for Proposition 19 on the site’s homepage.

Eight of the top 25 posts on Reddit are now images that promote the proposition. The top overall post? “YES to Prop 19; NO to corporate censorship.“

The official statement by Condé Nast is that it “does not want to benefit financially from this particular issue.” As a compromise, Reddit staffers have reversed the ban and are running pro-Proposition 19 ads without charge.

Reddit operates as a news aggregator that allows users to “upvote and downvote” news stories, links and self-written posts, similar to Digg and others. The top-voted links make it to the front page, and users can do the same with comments written for each individual link.

Reddit was launched in 2005 after getting backed by Silicon Valley startup incubator Y Combinator. It was acquired by media supergiant Condé Nast in 2006.

[Photo: pvera]