The New Digg features – initial review

Recently I received an invite to try out the new Digg V4 Alpha. It’s still in the initial testing phase but the new interface looks promising, and features exciting.

The email invite has these message – “Here are three things you can do to kick-start your Digg v4 alpha experience.”

• Find and follow your friends, influencers, and news sources you trust! Once you follow these Digg users, we’ll build a custom news homepage for you called “My News.” My News will display news stories to you as dugg by your friends.
• Get more followers! Aside from digging great content, one of the best ways to attract new followers is to update your profile. Add a photo and link to your blog, Twitter account, or Facebook profile.
• Explore the “My News” and “Top News” pages. My News is the custom news page we build for you based on the people you follow, Top News is the global zeitgeist showing you the most popular stories on Digg.

I was able to login using my old Digg credentials however initially, I got an error about the login and it said “82.7% chance that it’s Steve’s fault”. Funny but I got lost track who the hell is Steve. LOL.

The interface is much better, in my opinion, with bigger fonts, and cleaner overall layout. The main page, My News has a link submission conveniently placed on top.

You are also given a list of influential and popular Digg members that you can follow, and you can check who among your Google Connect, Facebook and Twitter friends are on Digg.

I was able to connect with Google and Twitter easily, however, Facebook connect failed. I have two google accounts, one personal, one for social media, unfortunately, I connected to Google using my personal account and I could not find a link or a utility to logout and login again using another Google account.

But one feature that really looks very promising is the Import Feeds functionality.  You can bring in your own contents to Digg automatically by setting up the RSS feed of your blogs. It will go through a simple process of verification, by just “including” a verification key into your next post.

So this means that with the new Digg, you are allowed to Digg your own contents automatically – that saves a lot of time but may also flood Digg with so many stories.

Another feature is the ability to put all your links and have them displayed at the right sidebar when someone views your Digg profile.

What is Digg.com?

Digg is a place for people to discover and share content from anywhere on the web. From the biggest online destinations to the most obscure blog.

Digg can be a good source of quality traffic if you write really great content. A single Digg can bring you a few to a hundred thousand visits, and in many cases, may bring down a site if you’re on a shared hosting or cheaper VPS hosting service.